Gwern Branwen wrote:
On 2007.10.08 12:17:52 -0700, Ray Saintonge scribbled
70 lines:
Gwern Branwen wrote
I don't think there's really anyway to
solve this. Nobody is really
advocating putting that kind of metadata into the article, which would
be a herculean and sisyphean task; nobody is seriously talking about
associating a second page with articles (one for discussion and the
other for metadata)
It does little good to belittle the idea of a separate
metadata page as
not serious when you don't even give arguemnts about why it's such a bad
idea.
It's not necessarily a bad idea, it's just that if we're going to
discuss changes to ameliorate this situation, let's focus on ones which actually have
a chance of getting implement. It's a fact of life here at En that large-scale
technical changes, however awesome they may be, usually don't happen and if they do it
takes *forever* (because of many factors ranging from inertia to not wanting to clean up
the ensuing mess to various developer issues to cruft, etc. etc.). This is true even for
really really important things like SUl, or - actually, this might be going a little bit
too far back here, but does anyone else remember Bug 550? That was an incredibly annoying
limitation which took years to change.
Anyway, the essential point is that user-run bots and scripts got us into this mess and
they seem to represent the most realistic way out.
That's always a major limitation. Bug 550 doesn't ring a bell, but it
would be easy for a Bug number to pass me by. The SUI problem remains
there, as does the development of an internal search function that
doesn't suck, and as do others. We certainly do not lack technical
talent. It's also important that maintenance issues have priority on
the developers time. It appears that it's the decision making process
that is in paralysis; that makes it easier to use short-sighted policy
workarounds.
But I think in a certain modest way there is a
solution. Just display
the talk automatically. At the bottom is a good place. Think about it:
if it's some worthless banners and templates, you simply stop
reading/scrolling-down at the categories - but if there is a lot left,
then you continue reading and merely skip over the templates. The
additional load time is negligible, it doesn't mess anything up, etc.
And it's a relatively simple addition to one's monobook.js:
<https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_User_scripts/Requests#Automatically_view_talk_page_discussion_while_looking_at_article>.
I'm not suggesting it be put into the site-wide file, but I think it
could be a step towards a programmatic solution for annoyed editors.
Not everybody wants to see the talk page, or even to load such a long
page. We already try to keep the article sizes down for the benefit of
people with slow browsers. An active talk page can be very, very long,
and can even have many archive pages. This idea is not much different
from sticking the metadata on the article page itself.
Well, I think browsers would usually begin rendering the frame containing the
talk page after the article proper.
.Some old browsers tend to be unresponsive even to such basic actions as
scrolling until the whole file is loaded.
If the idea
had any sort of usefulness it would need to be opt-in,
because we can't expect everybody to be able to make sense of
monobook.js. The ones who really need to use the talk page are not the
high-tech types that understand monobook.js; they are those editors who
may understand and are familiar with content while being mystified with
anything more complicated than the most basic wiki syntax.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be opt-in - 'I'm not suggesting
it be put into the site-wide file...' - but I think a more advanced version of this
(or at least *something* that would either recolor the talk link when it's all bots,
or transclude it if bots, or... really there are a lot of solutions here) would be good to
have generally available to the community.
Intuitively, something like this seems
much easier for segregating bots
and templates, or we already create archives for long talk pages. Could
a metapage be treated as a kind of special archive.
For example, it's an old and perennial proposal to
give rollback to non-admin editors, but it never has flown and never will out of sheer
inertia even if consensus is for it - but the people who need rollback while not an
administrator now have nice opt-in scripts like the TWINKLE stuff which are almost as good
as real rollback.
Inertia remains a human problem. Technical solutions can be
subject to
the same kind of ownership and protection problems as the articles
themselves. Most of us can have a basic (if erroneous) understanding of
the issues in a political debate, but that is not the case with
technical issues.
Ec