On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Matthew Brown morven@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 6:45 PM, Skyring skyring@gmail.com wrote:
So. Are we an international project, paying appropriate attention to internationalising our product, or are we a battleground of cultural imperialism?
We're a battleground of cultural imperialism, of course … even if we shouldn't be.
It does bother me, though, that one of the few, if imperfect, ways we had of presenting information in the way the reader preferred - I refer of course to our date formatting preferences - is being neutered because the implementation was poor, rather than improved.
The problems with it were twofold; firstly, that for un-logged-in users, it displayed a mishmash of styles that often ended up the worst possible solution, and secondly that it required wikilinks, which offended people who have an aversion to excess links in articles.
I have a strong feeling that it was actually the second reason that was the real driving force behind the delinking; I felt a sense of glee from partisans when they discovered that date preferences only worked for logged-in users and thus most of the readership didn't get pretty dates. It gave them a nice big club to use in debate to get what they wanted, which was prettier articles from their point of view.
To be fair, the date preferences-as-wikilinks situation *had* led to overlinking. I'm fairly liberal in terms of linking and tend to overlink from the view of many people, but even I see that many of the date links were pointless. The trouble is, not all were pointless and people argued over the details while the bots mostly ignored restrictions and stripped date links regardless of objections. Sometimes, in the most ridiculous cases, the bot operator talked to the objectors, the links were restored with promises that the bot would be changed, and then the next bot run removed the links again! That's just inept.
Better would have been fixing it to work better. Not leaving links in the HTML. Sensible defaults for non-logged-in users; most modern browsers send information on the user's language preference, including UK versus US; how much such preferences are accurately set I'm not sure, but it's there.
Agreed. Trouble is, there was foot-dragging going on and no-one really working on it. Then, when date-delinking started and some people started working (or resuming work) on a technical solution, there was too much momentum and the speed of the bot operations almost certainly discouraged those who had been working on technical solutions. Lots of bad-faith assumptions and foot-dragging and forcing "solutions" through.
Carcharoth