In general - I agree with you. Neither should you need a user-config.py when just reading wikipedia pages.

However. The current framework is so old, it has become quite hard to fix these kinds of issues. I'm not 100% sure what the rewrite does for these things - but fixing it there is much easier than fixing it in the current framework, where all kinds of issues are scattered around.

Last note - You're the first one I met who actually uses pydoc to inspect python objects. All other developers I know use the python prompt and object.__doc__ - then your problems are not an issue, which is probably why no-one has looked into this before. 

Best regards,

Merlijn van Deen