I'd like to enlist people's help in de-spamming personal articles which use Template:Libertarian . Its placement on various pages here and there is offensive to the eye as well as the ear, and its apparent excessive usage is no doubt 'Droidian in nature, if not altogether Randian in intent.
Even worse is the apparent usage of Template:Combi to sidestack templates; in contradiction of the Wikipedia:Sidestacking policy. The WLH for Template:Combi shows that this is not by any means limited to Libertarian articles, small-l or not, but its formation was no doubt originally propagated by Libertarians and for libertarians. My basic evidence of this is the unreadability of pages which have been thusly formatted.
As everyone knows, Libertarianism is just the kind of wishy-washy non-philosophy that poses the greatest threat of giving birth to some new quasi-intellectual incarnation of tacky backwater-class totalitarianism disguised as futuristic and innovative societal reform.
Its spammage on various pages is no doubt further evidence of this fact, and I'd like people to consider that its application should be restricted to the reasonable and not excessive; to the detriment of freedom and what passes for it.
Thanks, - sv
"One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing." -Mencken
On 9/17/06, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com wrote:
On Sep 17, 2006, at 2:53 PM, stvrtg wrote:
Even worse is the apparent usage of Template:Combi to sidestack templates; in contradiction of the Wikipedia:Sidestacking policy.
Please, please tell me this is not actually a policy.
It's a bit disingenuous for Stevertigo to write [[Wikipedia:Sidestacking and pinching]] himself, CLAIMING IT TO BE POLICY, and then invoke it as policy to try and get his way.
It comes complete with a warning template {{sidestack}} and an abbreviation redirect WP:SAP.
All of these are orphans, unlinked by the rest of Wikipedia, and thus not subject to anyone else's input.
Someone has, fortunately, since edited this "policy" and reclassified it as essay.
-Matt
stvrtg wrote:
As everyone knows, Libertarianism is just the kind of wishy-washy non-philosophy that poses the greatest threat of giving birth to some new quasi-intellectual incarnation of tacky backwater-class totalitarianism disguised as futuristic and innovative societal reform.
I'm sorry, but POV warriors aren't welcome on the Wikipedia project.
I do think sidebars should be generally used much less frequently than they are, but some sort of feverish political crusade isn't the right way to do it.
-Mark
On 9/17/06, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
I'm sorry, but POV warriors aren't welcome on the Wikipedia project.
Then who would be left?
I do think sidebars should be generally used much less frequently than
they are, but some sort of feverish political crusade isn't the right way to do it.
Not sidebars - sidestacked sidebars. Tool of the devil. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Combi
Some examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bastiat#Views http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy
For me, these all force any or most article text beneath them.
-sv
On 9/17/06, stvrtg stvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
Not sidebars - sidestacked sidebars. Tool of the devil. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Combi
For me, these all force any or most article text beneath them.
I do have to agree with you - these are ugly and really poor style. Seems to me that it's because several people created infoboxes or series boxes that apply and everyone wanted THEIRS to be at the top ...
Also, Template:Combi breaks what the developers have asked: that we not use templates that begin, but do not end, a table.
-Matt
Sunday, September 17, 2006, 10:15:33 PM, Delirium wrote:
D> stvrtg wrote:
As everyone knows, Libertarianism is just the kind of wishy-washy non-philosophy that poses the greatest threat of giving birth to some new quasi-intellectual incarnation of tacky backwater-class totalitarianism disguised as futuristic and innovative societal reform.
D> I'm sorry, but POV warriors aren't welcome on the Wikipedia project.
D> I do think sidebars should be generally used much less frequently than D> they are, but some sort of feverish political crusade isn't the right D> way to do it.
I say that sidebars should be used only on the articles actually listed in that sidebar. Putting a generic template in a specific topic is not very helpful for navigation, it would be better to try making some more specific templates or simply let it without any templates.
stvrtg wrote:
As everyone knows, Libertarianism is just the kind of wishy-washy non-philosophy that poses the greatest threat of giving birth to some new quasi-intellectual incarnation of tacky backwater-class totalitarianism disguised as futuristic and innovative societal reform.
Well, ironically perhaps, despite this inappropriate and irrelevant political rant, and the very POV title this thread started with, stvrtg actually raises a legitimate _editorial_ issue which applies _without regard to political position_.
These things can get rather a bit ugly.
--Jimbo
Articles generally don't need to be in more than two sidebars anyway; sidebars are good but they shouldn't be over used. And if there is a decent reason to remove all these templates I can write an app in VB to run through all the articles and remove the template (with human operation, of course) but there needs to be justification as changes can't be easily reverted en masse (yet), except by one of our busy sysops.
On 9/18/06, Bogdan Giusca liste@dapyx.com wrote:
Sunday, September 17, 2006, 10:15:33 PM, Delirium wrote:
D> stvrtg wrote:
As everyone knows, Libertarianism is just the kind of wishy-washy non-philosophy that poses the greatest threat of giving birth to some new quasi-intellectual incarnation of tacky backwater-class totalitarianism disguised as futuristic and innovative societal reform.
D> I'm sorry, but POV warriors aren't welcome on the Wikipedia project.
D> I do think sidebars should be generally used much less frequently than D> they are, but some sort of feverish political crusade isn't the right D> way to do it.
I say that sidebars should be used only on the articles actually listed in that sidebar. Putting a generic template in a specific topic is not very helpful for navigation, it would be better to try making some more specific templates or simply let it without any templates.
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I agree with Jimbo that this thread has become about something more important to us than Libertarian politics; this is not to say that I am not critical of that lot, but I can save that for another day.
Akash Mehta wrote:
Articles generally don't need to be in more than two sidebars anyway; sidebars are good but they shouldn't be over used. And if there is a decent reason to remove all these templates I can write an app in VB to run through all the articles and remove the template (with human operation, of course) but there needs to be justification as changes can't be easily reverted en masse (yet), except by one of our busy sysops.
I speak as a long-time Wikipedian who is more interested in content than pretty presentation. I had a hand in helping develop the early versions of taxoboxes, and descriptive boxes for battles. To some extent the use of charts and tables is essential for organizing data. But when we reach a point that changing the content of these charts and boxes is a mysterious process for the average user, or when it is only with great difficulty that one even finds what page to edit, then we have to consider the possibility that we have gotten away from the essential principal that this is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
When we speak of Wikipedia as a site that anyone can edit that means more to me than permission. That permission is hollow if a person lacks the techniques to do it. In the earliest time we took pride in the fact that wiki-markup was so simple that anyone could understand it; the essentials could be put on a single page that did not even need to be scrolled. Someone could edit without having to learn html. Can we still honestly say that a retired professor in the arts and humanities is still able to contribute from his vast experience? His familiarity with his subject may be unquestionable, but his expertise preceeded the cyber-age and did not depend on familiarity with computer languages.
We have many very competent technogeeks, but what produces aesthetic orgasms for them is a disincentive for many of the rest of us, or for many who just never bother. The templates that enhance the tecnogeek mindset and make his life easier have quite the opposite effect on others.
Akash's proposal to replace templates merits support.
Ec
On 9/18/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I speak as a long-time Wikipedian who is more interested in content than pretty presentation. I had a hand in helping develop the early versions of taxoboxes, and descriptive boxes for battles. To some extent the use of charts and tables is essential for organizing data. But when we reach a point that changing the content of these charts and boxes is a mysterious process for the average user, or when it is only with great difficulty that one even finds what page to edit, then we have to consider the possibility that we have gotten away from the essential principal that this is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
When we speak of Wikipedia as a site that anyone can edit that means more to me than permission. That permission is hollow if a person lacks the techniques to do it. In the earliest time we took pride in the fact that wiki-markup was so simple that anyone could understand it; the essentials could be put on a single page that did not even need to be scrolled. Someone could edit without having to learn html. Can we still honestly say that a retired professor in the arts and humanities is still able to contribute from his vast experience? His familiarity with his subject may be unquestionable, but his expertise preceeded the cyber-age and did not depend on familiarity with computer languages.
I strongly disagree. Our goal here must fundamentally be to produce an encyclopedia for the reader rather than merely to engage in the perpetual process of editing it. Producing a high-quality encyclopedia necessarily means allowing a somewhat more sophisticated set of layout and content presentation tools than the retired professor may be willing to learn -- but this is only a problem insofar as the professor *needs* to learn those tools. Just as we do not expect all users to be equally capable of taking high-quality photographs, writing FAs, or any of a variety of other tasks, we should not expect that all users will be equally capable of working on complex issues of templatized design and layout.
The retired professor, in your example, is most likely here to contribute content rather than to play around with the aesthetics of little colored boxes; the overwhelming majority of his exposure to templates will be either simply including them -- but usually there's no shortage of volunteers to do this anyways -- or using them as black boxes for data, like so
{{Infobox Clown |name= John Smith |born= January 10, 1904 |died= March 22, 1957 |country= United Kingdom }}
There is absolutely no reason, in most cases, for said professor to concern himself with how {{Infobox Clown}} transforms the values he enters into a pretty table; if he's particularly interested in layout issues, he can always ask someone for help if he can't figure things out.
Forcing everyone else to abandon all the sophisticated presentation tools we've developed, meanwhile, will drastically decrease the quality of page layout in the encyclopedia, and won't help the professor in the least, as the nice "black box" template will either be replaced with a fragile table, or nothing at all -- neither of which is something he'll be particularly pleased to work with, I suspect.
On 9/19/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/18/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I speak as a long-time Wikipedian who is more interested in content than pretty presentation. I had a hand in helping develop the early versions of taxoboxes, and descriptive boxes for battles. To some extent the use of charts and tables is essential for organizing data. But when we reach a point that changing the content of these charts and boxes is a mysterious process for the average user, or when it is only with great difficulty that one even finds what page to edit, then we have to consider the possibility that we have gotten away from the essential principal that this is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
When we speak of Wikipedia as a site that anyone can edit that means more to me than permission. That permission is hollow if a person lacks the techniques to do it. In the earliest time we took pride in the fact that wiki-markup was so simple that anyone could understand it; the essentials could be put on a single page that did not even need to be scrolled. Someone could edit without having to learn html. Can we still honestly say that a retired professor in the arts and humanities is still able to contribute from his vast experience? His familiarity with his subject may be unquestionable, but his expertise preceeded the cyber-age and did not depend on familiarity with computer languages.
I strongly disagree. Our goal here must fundamentally be to produce an encyclopedia for the reader rather than merely to engage in the perpetual process of editing it.
There's no reason this has to be mutually exclusive since #2 helps #1. I'll explain in a bit. But you must admit editing has become quite complex.
1. We used to use CamelCase syntax for linking to BobNey 2. Then it became [[Bob Ney]] with free links 3. Add a template like {{current}} 4. Then add an infobox like {{Infobox Congressman | name=Robert William Ney | image name=Bob Ney.jpg 5. Then add inline references like <ref>[http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001532.php DOJ press release on Ney's plea]</ref> 6. Add some tables, images, categories, etc.
I used to be a programmer/coder, so I'm not scared of funky code and symbols. But even my eyes glaze over when I need to decipher a taxobox, an inline reference or a table. Unless I'm really determined, I avoid editing it.
Even for doing images, it's way too hard. That's not good.
For those not at Wikimania hacking days, there were two presentations relevant to this issue of "user experience" while editing.
1) One was a presentation from OpenUsability which provided a good evaluation of user testing on editing Wikipedia pages. http://www.openusability.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=950
We needed a good friend to tell us - images and commons are way too hard for the average person to decipher. Licenses confusing, too many steps, what the hell is Commons, is my login the same? The presentation was received warmly - the developers in the room all know this is a big problem with putting in images.
2) WIKIWYG and parsing. Certainly a next logical step for WP is WYSIWYG editing, or at least the option of it. Some people like the power of markup, but for newbies graphical (ie. MS Word) editing would be more inclusive. For that you need markup->WYSIWYG->markup conversion. Well one of the [[Google Summer of Code]] participants spent his summer trying to create a "parser" to do just that. He failed. And not for lack of smarts, but because everyone recognizes what a rats nest Wikimarkup syntax is, having morphed over the years haphazardly. Every developer in the room had compassion for the young chap who tried it, and everyone recognized how incredibly hard a problem this is.
So the prospect of that conversion is grim, at least right now, without a major breakthrough, or altering Wikimarkup syntax to be more "normal" and running a script to change all "n" million articles. Yikes.
Producing a high-quality encyclopedia necessarily means allowing a somewhat more sophisticated set of layout and content presentation tools than the retired professor may be willing to learn -- but this is only a problem insofar as the professor *needs* to learn those tools. Just as we do not expect all users to be equally capable of taking high-quality photographs, writing FAs, or any of a variety of other tasks, we should not expect that all users will be equally capable of working on complex issues of templatized design and layout.
Understandable attitude but disconcerting. Some view Wikimarkup the same way as a "tech literacy test" to act as a bozo filter. (See [[Literacy test]]) I'm not a fan of, "Keeping it hard keeps it elite."
The retired professor, in your example, is most likely here to contribute content rather than to play around with the aesthetics of little colored boxes; the overwhelming majority of his exposure to templates will be either simply including them -- but usually there's no shortage of volunteers to do this anyways -- or using them as black boxes for data, like so
I would contend that this "retired" professor even seeing the arcane boxes and such would be intimdated enough not to even dive into it. And I have first-hand knowledge of such a case.
When I visited the Wikimedia Foundation in Florida last month, the dean of a prominent US college contacted the office, and she said she was an enthusiastic fan of Wikipedia, and thought it was great. But she also said that it was darn intimidating to edit, when she saw all that Wikimarkup. She wanted to contribute to areas for which she is a published author! But Wikimarkup is too hard and intimidating.
So this was not a "retired" professor but a professor and dean, at the top of her game, with enthusiastic interest, who was intimidated.
There is absolutely no reason, in most cases, for said professor to concern himself with how {{Infobox Clown}} transforms the values he enters into a pretty table; if he's particularly interested in layout issues, he can always ask someone for help if he can't figure things out.
You should observe some user testing sometime to see exactly how people react to these situations. The frustration threshold for users is typically very low.
Forcing everyone else to abandon all the sophisticated presentation tools we've developed, meanwhile, will drastically decrease the quality of page layout in the encyclopedia, and won't help the professor in the least, as the nice "black box" template will either be replaced with a fragile table, or nothing at all -- neither of which is something he'll be particularly pleased to work with, I suspect.
It does not have to be mutualy exclusive. It's a hard problem, but they are not inherently at odds.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)
On 9/18/06, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
It does not have to be mutualy exclusive. It's a hard problem, but they are not inherently at odds.
Of course they're not. But the answer will necessarily be more complex -- and much more flexible -- than merely "kill all the damn boxes"; we can't afford to cater *only* to those editors who can't deal with complex markup any more than we can afford to cater *only* to those who can.
(I wonder whether a limited syntax highliter of sorts -- looking for, say, template invocations image inclusions, categories/interwiki links, and <ref> tags -- would be easier to write. Most of the unpleasant markup that's likely to be seen in the average article is one of those types.)
Kirill Lokshin wrote:
On 9/18/06, Andrew Lih andrew.lih@gmail.com wrote:
It does not have to be mutualy exclusive. It's a hard problem, but they are not inherently at odds.
Of course they're not. But the answer will necessarily be more complex -- and much more flexible -- than merely "kill all the damn boxes"; we can't afford to cater *only* to those editors who can't deal with complex markup any more than we can afford to cater *only* to those who can.
Indeed not. But we should also remember, as the Perl folks are fond of pointing out, that there's more than one way to do it.
We could somehow make it easier to edit complicated templates and other elaborate structure. We could try to get rid of or strenuously minimize the too-complicated templates and other elaborate structure. We could foster an attitude that it's totally okay, with no inherent stigma or shame, to edit article text in ignorance of its structure (i.e. by blatting in raw, unstructured new text) with the knowledge that someone else will be along to fix up the structure soon enough. We could come up with more ways of linking experts who know the material with mentors who know how to navigate the editing system (some aspect of which, not matter what we do, is always going to be onerous for some would-be editors). Or of course we could do a combination of these things, or all of these things.