[Foundation-l] News from Germany: White Bags and thinking about a fork

[MZMcBride]

Erik Moeller wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 2:56 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 22 October 2011 22:51, Tobias Oelgarte
>> And, in detail, why is a hide/show all solution inadequate? What is
>> the use case this does not serve?
> 
> Clearly Hebrew and Arabic Wikipedia found a "show/hide all" solution
> inadequate. Are folks from those communities on the list? It would be
> interesting to hear from them as to why they ended up with the
> collapsing approach they took.

Clearly nothing, Erik. You know not to make irrational and unfounded jumps
like this when examining a phenomenon. You're a programmer, FFS.

There's nothing to suggest that the Hebrew or Arabic Wikipedias found a
show/hide solution inadequate. There's quite a bit to suggest that such a
solution is much more difficult to (decently) implement, though. There's
also quite a bit to suggest that wiki-editors work with the tools available
to them generally, not the tools that could be available to them.

Collapsing has been used in navboxes at the bottom of the page for ages. I'm
not sure if it's the German Wikipedia or the English Wikipedia that started
it, but the history is surely in MediaWiki:Common.js or
MediaWiki:Monobook.js, for those who are interested. In any case, the
English Wikipedia, at least, used to do the exact same with certain images.
There were even a few helper templates. I think "Template:Linkimage" was
one; "Template:PopUpImage" appears to be another, looking through the
revision history of "Autofellatio" on the English Wikipedia. I don't believe
any such templates are used (legitimately) to obscure or obfuscate images on
the English Wikipedia today. They were tossed out some time ago.

This was the technology available to wiki-editors, so this is what they
chose to use. Necessity and opportunity are the parents of all hacks,
surely.

Drawing a conclusion such as "Hebrew and Arabic Wikipedia found a 'show/hide
all' solution inadequate" from the historical evidence doesn't make any
sense to me. If there's evidence of this conclusion (beyond relying on the
absence of implementation), I'm sure many people on this list would be
interested in it.

It should be noted that there are also on-wiki resources for plotting
actions and events related to controversial content:
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Controversial_content/Timeline>. I strongly
urge you and others to add information (with cites, as necessary and
appropriate). :-)

MZMcBride