On 6/8/06, Tony Sidaway f.crdfa@gmail.com wrote:
Wikipedia is a project that thrives only because people want to spend a ridiculous amount of their time on it.
If they want *us* to spend a ridiculous amount of time discerning the comments on a discussion page from the clutter of their signatures, I think they'll be very disappointed with Wikipedia. But you know what? That's okay. They can go somewhere else to play silly buggers.
Gosh, Tony, I didn't realize you had such a hard trouble reading discussion pages, what with all of those colors and fonts! Maybe there is some sort of css hack you could implement which would strip all fancy tricks from the talk pages.
Personally, I've never found it too difficult to read the text itself. Sometimes the names can take me about a millisecond to figure out (thank goodness that mouseover tells me the URL in the status bar!), but since that's usually not a major element of reading a discussion page I wouldn't consider it a "ridiculous amount" of my time. But I understand some people probably have more difficulty than others. I didn't realize it was causing you such a daily inconvenience.
Sarcasm aside, I'm happy with saying that people who are legitimately trying to be disruptive (which is what I assume you mean by "play silly buggers") are told to knock it off, the same we would in any other disruptive situation. But I suspect such people are in the slim minority of those who customize their signatures. And I think that trying to maintain too close a control on the "community", and trying to enforce arbitrary style standards on discussion and user namespaces, is far more disruptive than the phenomena it is trying to control.
I apologize for being so irritable on this (and many other) issues, but I find much of these discussions about various things users should or shouldn't do in an ideal world not very helpful for the production of an encyclopedia. I'm not saying that we'd necessarily be terribly different if people spent as much time thinking about how to maintain article stability in a system of open editing as they did userboxes and signatures, but we'd have relatively fewer acrimonious arguments and pointless battles.
FF