On 10/24/07, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
Not in the sense I'm talking about here. Most Wikipedia edits have an effect proportional to the effort required. If I put a few naughty words in a page, I've disturbed one page out of millions. Because cleaning up is generally even easier than vandalizing, the balance of power stays on the side of the angels.
But when you amplify someone's power, you create opportunities for trouble. A guy with a backhoe can do a lot more damage than a guy with a shovel, often without even knowing it.
Agreed. I think it would be best to limit the number of possible aliases for a page, probably somewhere between 10 and 20.
Well, I you should let the alias creator know when the collide with
existing articles, as touching the articles would be wrong, and silent, invisible failure is not so good either. I think you could auto-disambiguate when aliases cross, but you'd probably want a hint to write the needed text. You should also tell people when they encounter the technical limitations of Wikipedia (by by violating WP:NCTR).
I'm not sure how much I stated before, but here was my assumption in terms of searching:
- Search term matches no real pages, no aliases: takes you to some search results. - Search term matches one real page, no aliases: takes you to real page. - Search term matches one real page, some aliases: takes you to real page. (Arguably gives you a "did you mean...?" banner, but not critical) - Search term matches one alias, no real page: takes you to page. - Search term matches several aliases, no real page: takes you to auto disambig page. Some other keyword could be used to specify the text that would appear here (and would be useful for other contexts too).
It suddenly occurs to me that you could actually do without the auto disambig page, as follows: - Search term matches several aliases, no real page: shows you search results (as if you had matched nothing), but the top few pages are those matched by the aliases. The formatting could be tweaked to ensure the text comes from the first paragraph. That way it would almost function like a disambig page anyway.
That's definitely another case. I think our options for all of these are
- silent failure (accept #ALIASES line but do nothing or do it only partially)
That's not terrible, particularly if we can monitor these failures, and perhaps alert the user.
2. noisy rejection (refuse to save, give error message)
Very bad. What if they'd written 10 paragraphs plus the #ALIASES line, they're about to lose internet access, and they can't save? Bad.
3. noisy failure (accept save, but put an error message in the page)
Ok.
4. special tool (JavaScript widget that gives continuous feedback)
Yes, but obviously much more work.
And I can make cases for and against any of them. I'd think what really
matters is what the core MediaWiki team prefers, but I'd lead towards #3.
#3 and #1 seem equally ok to me.
Steve