I don't have anything against articles in many
different flavors & formats. Ok, when i write articles i try to write'em in a
certain way, so they have coherence. But apart that, people should do what they want.
To quote Rlandmann from my talk page,
"Pointers for aircraft (including helos) are at Wikipedia:WikiProject
Aircraft, where you'll also find links to the category system and
current standard layout for these articles. I standardised your CH-21
Shawnee article as an example.
While there are now some quite evolved standards for warships and
aircraft, standards for weapon systems more generally are all over the
shop. There seems to have been an effort at creating a navigational
template for missiles ( {{Missile types}} ), but it hasn't been widely
rolled out, and perhaps was really only intended for general articles
on categories of missile rather than specific systems anyway.
Similarly, while a standard spec table for small arms was developed,
it hasn't been implemented widely (and WikiProject Weaponry is now
listed as inactive anyway).
There have been at least two attempts to develop a broad-based and
consistent way to categorise weapons, but neither went very far.
Given the mess, at the moment I really only try to make sure that
weapons articles are reasonably well-classified, and that aircraft
weapon systems carry the {{airlistbox}} template. I also list new
aircraft articles here and standardise them when I get the time
(currently bogged down in mid-February).
If you want to have a stab at it, some kind of consistency is
desperately needed for weapons on Wikipedia. At the moment, it's
pretty much a model of the worst aspects of collaborative editing, so
it'll be a long-term project!"
So I am clearly not alone in believing that content standardization is
a good thing. I think there are two very strong arguments for content
standardization (across categories, not across the entire site).
FIrst, is the appearance, one of a cohesive and organized project.
Second, machine parseability. As I mentioned in my original message, I
have written many content scrapers, and it is exceptionally difficult
to do for data which is so irregular. An earlier thread on this very
list, earlier this week (sorry, I've since trashed it), where somebody
said something (I paraphrase here), I am not aware that a parser for
mediawiki exists. Wiki is notoriously hard to parse. Once you pick a
wiki, you're stuck with it, because the data becomes so free-form and
disorganized that a move (say from instiki to mediawiki) becomes an
exercise in the impossible.
To request that we use the:
{
| foo metric
| bar value
|-
| baz metric
| quux value
}
notation is not asking much. Or indeed, to standardize, as Rlandmann
did with my [[CH-21 Shawnee]] article per the guidelines at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Aircraft/page_content,
on that. But when every article you come across is different it is
difficult to obtain the information you have /come to wikipedia to
find/. The wiktionary (which which I have only a passing familiarity,
but I do contribute) is very clear in their "guidelines" that there is
to be consistency, and you /shall/ use templates, rather than "It
would be nice, but don't feel obligated to do so."
The wikipedia is not an exercise in anarchy.
I'm not sure we want to standardize everything. Because it means people have to learn
that format, to know where to find it in the first place. You have to enforce it. It makes
for wars as new users come in, or people don't like the format, and say "hey this
format should be changed like that", and people reply "per decision of 2 weeks
earlier no, we keep that", and so on and so on.
I'm real happy to go through and standardize articles. In fact, when I
find an article that looks like it needs help, as I did with [[USS
Bowfin (SS-287)]], I came on IRC to #wikipedia, and got help from
admins who knew the { .. } wiki table format, explained it to me, and
I went around looking at what everything else looked like, and made
sure that "my page" looked just like the rest of them. It presently
looks like it needs a little help (that image/text placement irks me).
Sigh.
5. Fancruft and how to cope
Sure. When the wiki is slow, we should just cut off en:.
After all, that's a fancruft, and it shouldn't exist.
Or we should just concatenate all pages in one big page, there wouldn't need to have
any page existence checking.
You know, I worked really hard to write a concise message to the list,
to address a lot of concerns that I had. I offered myself wholly for
help. I expressed a willingness to work with the community which seems
to support "fancruft networks." I've received a lot of shit about this
on IRC, and here on this list. I really don't appreciate it, and I
don't see how people can be such biased assholes and say things like
"just turn off en." Even as a joke. We are having weekly outages. At
least. THERE IS A PROBLEM. It will require work to fix, and people are
going to get their toes stepped on. Maybe they're yours, maybe they're
mine, but let's not take potshots at eachother.
More seriously: saying that merging articles could
(help) solve slowness is a bad social solution to a technical problem. People want to
write articles, as many as they want.
I said I didn't know what the exact benefit or detriment was to
merging many small articles (such as in the case of MMPR). I said that
I'd like to know. A couple people have commented that they'd like to
try the squids on FreeBSD (which has a fancier network stack than
Linux, although 2.6 seems to be about even. But I digress..). People
say that they'd like to beta test with postgres. What I am saying is
there are problems and we are propping up the entire operation with
constant maintenance, but no forward progress is being made. Nobody is
testing whether the wikipedia is faster with many condensed pages
(frankly, how to conduct that test is a mystery to me) or with lots of
smaller pages. Maybe that's something that could be asked of the MySQL
developers.
What would be next? "Sorry, you made more than 5
modifications in the last 15 minutes, please wait 15 minutes to that everyone get a chance
to edit"?
Nobody is saying throttle users. Nobody is saying limit the number of
pages one can create in a given category. There's no need to scream
about the sky falling, that throttling and edit limits are on the
horizon because some fascist asshole is going to impose them on all
the doe-eyed wikipedians. It isn't. We need to work together to find a
solution.
Site is slow? Make software faster, buy new hardware,
optimize, imagine a bewolf cluster of servers on the moon, whatever - do *not* try to
restrict the freedom people have.
I AM NOT ADVOCATING THE RESTRICTING OF ANYONES FREEDOM, for the last time.
However, you just fell into the trap that most software development
projects fall into.
"Oh, our software runs slow. Well, buy faster hardware."
"Oh, our software runs slow. Well, make the software faster."
When you find that you have flaws in your ARCHITECTURE (and I pointed
out at least two), you need to fix it from a high level. I wish we
could all sit in a room and draw this out on a whiteboard. You for one
would be a lot less hostile.
Sorry if my tone sounds rash. I'm totally against
your idea, maybe because I do write "fancruft" articles but also because
it's imo totally against the founding ideas of Wikipedia - this doesn't mean i
despise you :)
You're totally against WHAT idea? This is why I said this should be
discussed in wiki format, on the wiki. Or did you not read that far?
alex
--
Alex Avriette
avriette(a)gmail.com