Nicolas Weeger wrote: Indeed. keats appears to be starting from a personal distaste and then claiming this will be the destruction of Wikipedia. I note a curious lack of substantiating, ahh, numbers. keats, do you have any? Fundamentally, taking out the word "fancruft": keats appears to be claiming that the mere fact of having 500k articles is unsustainable in MediaWiki. Is this the case? Do we stop all article creation now? If not, what do we do? Ration them? - d.

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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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