[For the record, this was a response to
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1085 ]
[Civility:]
Rob Church <robchur@...> writes:
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.
Being blunt or dismissive is completely contrary to the letter and spirit of
WP:CIV. Things like:
* Rudeness
* Judgmental tone
* Belittling contributors because of their skills
* Personally targeted behavior that causes an atmosphere of greater
conflict and
stress
"Bluntness", if that's what we're calling it now, only makes things
worse, and I
see it a lot when developers are involved.
I would very much like to see some guidelines for interpersonal behavior in the
development process. As far as community and wikilove are concerned,
development of the site's software shouldn't be any different from development
of the site. No one should get a special exemption to be an asshole to other
Wikipedians just because they know PHP.
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
Shouldn't that have been implemented *before* going live with this feature?
There's always the
Subversion log. Oh, but of course...non developers don't apparently
like opening their damn browsers.
What's a Subversion log?
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.
Oh please. The exact same thing could be said about the site's users. Without
content contributors, there would be no point in even *having* a
website, etc. etc.
Disputes like this could drive *both* developers and editors away, and we need
both (though in practice, it doesn't drive anyone away; it just causes them
undue stress and impedes progress).
We're all volunteers, here. We're all contributing our free time to the same
altruistic project without getting anything in return except appreciation. Some
of us know how to code websites, some of us know about Japanese fighter planes,
some of us know how to write CSS, some of use know about rodent biology. More
love and understanding and less arrogance, elitism, and belligerence, please.
The problem here is that visible changes to the site's functionality can be made
in a few different ways (Mediawiki itself, site javascript, site CSS, template
markup), and when there is such a change, it's not discoverable at all how that
change was made or who was responsible for it. It's not visible except to the
few people who happen to be watching that template, or watching that CSS page,
or know how to access and understand Mediawiki's CVS or whatever it is. There's
no centralized place on the site where new features are announced ("You'll be
noticing a new addition to the watchlists starting today; it tells you this and
that and does this and that"). There's no centralized discussion point where
people can present their ideas for features and have those features critiqued by
the people who are actually going to use them. There's no test site where
features are auditioned before going live. Things just go live randomly, in
ways that may or may not be optimal for the site, and no one even knows where to
complain.
[Now, onto the actual feature being discussed:]
Gurch <matthew.britton@...> writes:
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.
That's fine. But these numbers are similar to those changes. Only a few people
want or use them, but they're on by default. Like implementing your "ugly as
sin" diffs for the entire site by default, and then telling people they need to
change their user CSS to remove them. It should be the other way around.
Something like this should be a user preference. "Edit your user CSS" is NOT a
user interface. Wikipedia editors are supposed to be regular people; not
hackers. The site is supposed to be easy to edit, to avoid systemic bias, but
it just gets more and more technical and more difficult to use all the time.
Easy-to-use wiki markup has been abandoned in favor of HTML-esque tags for
everything, article source code is cluttered with ref tags and table markup and
on and on. (I don't think refs or tables are bad, of course; I just think they
were not fully thought through, and implemented in a rush without much feedback
from the non-hackers who have to use them. There are better solutions out there
in the proposals bins that have just been ignored.)
I don't even see what these numbers are useful for. Maybe if someone lies in an
edit summary and says "small change" while the numbers say "big
change", but
that's about it. It doesn't give me any useful information about the diff
except in that case. They don't actually tell how big the edit is, as some
have said; they just tell how much the page has changed in size. That's a
pretty meaningless metric. It may even be harmful; giving a false sense of
security for low numbers. Changing
"He was elected the" into
"I like to eat poop", for instance, tells the patroller that nothing
significant
has been changed:
12:31 User:Omegatron/George W Bush (diff; hist) . . (0) . .
Omegatron (Talk | contribs | block)
These numbers don't tell me what the edit actually was; I still have to visit
the diff as I normally would. They don't even tell me which edits to
preferentially focus on for fighting vandalism. I behave exactly the same when
viewing my watchlist with or without these numbers. I don't see how they help
anything or save time anywhere. And no, I'm not a lone whiner:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Added_or_removed_characters#To_…
A much, much more useful solution would be to expand the automatic edit summary
feature for all edits, as has been suggested several times for a few years. We
finally got a limited auto edit summary feature recently
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Automatic_edit_summaries), which is
great and really helpful, but it should be expanded to cover all types of diffs
and then shown on *every* edit, regardless of whether the user fills out an edit
summary or not. The edit summary field would be used for a prose summary of
what was edited and the rationale for the edit, but the automatic summary would
tell explicitly *what* was edited, and, in a lot of cases, completely prevent
the need to view diffs to see whether the edits were valid or not, saving
bandwidth and money for the servers and saving time for editors. Vandalism
would be immediately visible on watchlists or recent changes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Automatic_edit_summaries#How_to…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28perennial_proposals%…
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1307