[This is in response to all the bitching and whining that's taken place since December 24th, on mailing lists, bug trackers, village pumps and sleazy little back-alley forums...I apologise for the crossposting. As ever, please feel free to forward this to other appropriate parties or lists, but keep responses and/or discussion on one.]
All right, this bickering has gone far enough. The fact of the matter is that we're under constant pressure to keep the site alive and introduce new features and fixes on a regular basis. I can well understand that a lot of people will object to each change, and we do our best to make things non-intrusive.
When this feature was first introduced, some bright spark on the English Wikipedia edited the global CSS and made the numbers bright, garish green and red, and emboldened them - I didn't agree with that, but whatever. However, there were a huge number of not-too-polite complaints blaming us for doing it, and some of these failed to subside when it was pointed out that this had nothing to do with the development team.
We might not implement their letter, but the spirit of the ideas of keeping civil and assuming good faith *are* applied at the development level; we just reserve the right to be blunt. If I've been particularly rude to anyone over this issue, I do apologise for it - and I'm sure anyone else who may have been apologises too.
If we're to implement certain tweaks for this in user preferences, then we need some co-operation from the user base to allow us time to determine a clean means of doing so (we want to avoid duplication of code when generating changes list items), and we want people to remember that politeness goes both ways.
Just because user A dislikes a feature, it doesn't mean that user B will, and it is not fair to scream and rant and rave over it because we tried to implement something that was useful. I would like to note also that the numbers, as with the "minor edit" flag, and the whole concept of edit summaries, are advisory - what we provide is a factual statement of who changed what, and how much they changed, and we allow that user to present justification for their changes. If that user chose to lie in their edit summary, or deliberately mis-labelled a minor edit, then there is nothing any of us can do - and you (the users) have coped with that well enough over (at least) the past four years or so.
I will open a fresh feature request, giving an opportunity for Brion to say "yes" or "no" definitively, and I will avail myself to Leon or anyone else who would then wish to implement the outcome should they want any input.
I point-blank refuse, however, to work with any user who feels that it is acceptable to assume bad faith on the part of the development team. That attitude could very well lose you a lot of the behind-the-scenes supporting cast one day, without whom you wouldn't even *have* a website.
Rob Church
I can't speak for everyone, but I highly value the contributions of all users, from the anons making their first tentative edits, to vandal patrollers, article writers, cleanup task forces, and yes, even the devs. Without so much help, surely the wiki wouldn't be around, or wouldn't be nearly as successful. Not to mention, the devs are some of our most particularly skilled volunteers -- and we all are *volunteers*.
I've assumed the new numbers (I'm not sure what to call them) were wrapped in a div or span to make them friendly to CSS customization. From there on, if a user doesn't like them, they're free to change the colors, text decoration, or anything else, or even just make them disappear. As is frequently the case with open source projects, if you don't like something, you're usually free to *fix it*.
...and if you don't know how, at least have the sense to complain productively. Good feedback is hard to come by; I've always been of the opinion that the internet has an awfully high "signal to noise" ratio, almost like finding a needle in a haystack.
On the bright side, I see this as an excellent chance to teach a few people how to play with their custom CSS options.
I like the numbers. Long live new features.
-Luna
On 12/30/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
[This is in response to all the bitching and whining that's taken place since December 24th, on mailing lists, bug trackers, village pumps and sleazy little back-alley forums...I apologise for the crossposting. As ever, please feel free to forward this to other appropriate parties or lists, but keep responses and/or discussion on one.]
All right, this bickering has gone far enough. The fact of the matter is that we're under constant pressure to keep the site alive and introduce new features and fixes on a regular basis. I can well understand that a lot of people will object to each change, and we do our best to make things non-intrusive.
When this feature was first introduced, some bright spark on the English Wikipedia edited the global CSS and made the numbers bright, garish green and red, and emboldened them - I didn't agree with that, but whatever. However, there were a huge number of not-too-polite complaints blaming us for doing it, and some of these failed to subside when it was pointed out that this had nothing to do with the development team.
We might not implement their letter, but the spirit of the ideas of keeping civil and assuming good faith *are* applied at the development level; we just reserve the right to be blunt. If I've been particularly rude to anyone over this issue, I do apologise for it - and I'm sure anyone else who may have been apologises too.
If we're to implement certain tweaks for this in user preferences, then we need some co-operation from the user base to allow us time to determine a clean means of doing so (we want to avoid duplication of code when generating changes list items), and we want people to remember that politeness goes both ways.
Just because user A dislikes a feature, it doesn't mean that user B will, and it is not fair to scream and rant and rave over it because we tried to implement something that was useful. I would like to note also that the numbers, as with the "minor edit" flag, and the whole concept of edit summaries, are advisory - what we provide is a factual statement of who changed what, and how much they changed, and we allow that user to present justification for their changes. If that user chose to lie in their edit summary, or deliberately mis-labelled a minor edit, then there is nothing any of us can do - and you (the users) have coped with that well enough over (at least) the past four years or so.
I will open a fresh feature request, giving an opportunity for Brion to say "yes" or "no" definitively, and I will avail myself to Leon or anyone else who would then wish to implement the outcome should they want any input.
I point-blank refuse, however, to work with any user who feels that it is acceptable to assume bad faith on the part of the development team. That attitude could very well lose you a lot of the behind-the-scenes supporting cast one day, without whom you wouldn't even *have* a website.
Rob Church _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Luna wrote:
I've assumed the new numbers (I'm not sure what to call them) were wrapped in a div or span to make them friendly to CSS customization. From there on, if a user doesn't like them, they're free to change the colors, text decoration, or anything else, or even just make them disappear. As is frequently the case with open source projects, if you don't like something, you're usually free to *fix it*.
The non-bold numbers are to be wrapped in <span> tags with one of the following three classes:
mw-plusminus-neg (< 0, currently red) mw-plusminus-null (0, currently grey) mw-plusminus-pos (> 0, currently green)
The bold numbers are wrapped in <strong> tags with the same class. I'm not sure if this means the boldness can be customized with CSS but the colours certainly can be. (I never use Recent Changes so haven't tried myself).
-Gurch
On 12/30/06, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
I've assumed the new numbers (I'm not sure what to call them) were wrapped in a div or span to make them friendly to CSS customization. From there on, if a user doesn't like them, they're free to change the colors, text decoration, or anything else, or even just make them disappear. As is frequently the case with open source projects, if you don't like something, you're usually free to *fix it*.
Customising your own CSS style sheets is exactly the opposite of *fixing it*.
Steve
Steve Bennett wrote:
On 12/30/06, Luna lunasantin@gmail.com wrote:
I've assumed the new numbers (I'm not sure what to call them) were wrapped in a div or span to make them friendly to CSS customization. From there on, if a user doesn't like them, they're free to change the colors, text decoration, or anything else, or even just make them disappear. As is frequently the case with open source projects, if you don't like something, you're usually free to *fix it*.
Customising your own CSS style sheets is exactly the opposite of *fixing it*.
Steve
That is arguably true. However, if two groups of people have different opinions over how the interface should look, only one of these can be made the default; members of the other group must then make personal changes in order to achieve the desired format. (Unless a new skin or entry in the preferences page is created for every minor interface tweak, which would be rediculous). This is standard practise; I have modified (or more usually removed) dozens of things in my personal interface, and have never expected these changes to be made on a global level nor provided as preferences.
-Gurch
On 12/30/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Customising your own CSS style sheets is exactly the opposite of *fixing it*.
Steve
Different people want the interface to look different. Rather than wasting time with endless arguments over who gets "their way," just let everybody see what they want to see. Everybody wins when the interface can be customized.
I've been told the Firefox community used to be held up by flamewars over tabs -- specifically, when we close an open tab, which tab displays next? One camp wanted to display the next tab to the right; another camp wanted to traverse to the left; still a third camp wanted to remember the order in which tabs had been selected, and move to the most recently selected tab. In my opinion, all three of these groups missed the point: all three options have followings and are apparently legitimate, and it's more productive to just allow the user to choose their preferred method.
Saves time. Saves drama. Lets us all get on with writing an encyclopedia.
Why is that a problem?
-Luna
Luna wrote:
On 12/30/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
Customising your own CSS style sheets is exactly the opposite of *fixing it*.
Steve
Different people want the interface to look different. Rather than wasting time with endless arguments over who gets "their way," just let everybody see what they want to see. Everybody wins when the interface can be customized.
I've been told the Firefox community used to be held up by flamewars over tabs -- specifically, when we close an open tab, which tab displays next? One camp wanted to display the next tab to the right; another camp wanted to traverse to the left; still a third camp wanted to remember the order in which tabs had been selected, and move to the most recently selected tab. In my opinion, all three of these groups missed the point: all three options have followings and are apparently legitimate, and it's more productive to just allow the user to choose their preferred method.
Saves time. Saves drama. Lets us all get on with writing an encyclopedia.
Why is that a problem?
-Luna
Exactly. I very much doubt anyone wants their diffs to look like mine (the stuff that's usually grey isn't even visible, they're blue and yellow, and generally ugly as sin). I also doubt many people want the "Go" and "Search" buttons hidden, as I have done (I just press Enter to Go, and my browser has a search box). But that's the way *I* want things, and because the interface can be customized that way I can have it that way.
The numbers on Recent Changes are no different. If you want to have them pink and orange, you can; if you want to have them them in 72-point text, you can. If you don't want to see them at all, you can; and if you want them to appear as they do by default in MediaWiki, rather than use the project-specific default specified in (I assume) Common.css, you can override it.
-Gurch