On 01/01/07, Omegatron <9ybf94w02(a)sneakemail.com> wrote:
"Bluntness", if that's what we're
calling it now, only makes things worse, and I
see it a lot when developers are involved.
When I say "being blunt", I mean calling a bad idea a bad idea from
the get-go, and not messing around.
of the site. No one should get a special exemption to
be an asshole to other
Wikipedians just because they know PHP.
Are you calling me an asshole?
Are you calling some other developer(s) assholes?
Shouldn't that have been implemented *before*
going live with this feature?
It wasn't deemed necessary at the time, because we didn't realise
users would get so up in arms about it.
What's a Subversion log?
The log of commits to the Subversion repository.
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.
Oh, for goodness' sake...
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
You're saying we should have some sort of centralised updates page?
"There's no centralized discussion point where people can present
their ideas for features" -- BugZilla, when it comes down to being up
to us to get it written. Prior to that, discussion can take place
somewhere in the Wikipedia namespace.
Could I just remind you here that MediaWiki is not written just for
the English Wikipedia. It is written to benefit every single Wikimedia
wiki, in every single language that we support. It often happens that
features are added because the English Wikipedia asks for them, but it
often happens that feature requests come from other Wikipedias, and
they have an absolute right to ask for things, and an absolute right
to have their requests taken into consideration, too.
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.
Well, apparently, you do.
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.
"Only a few people want or use them". Well, it's always the ones
who're complaining who are the loudest. I'm pretty sure there are
hundreds of users who find the information useful, and haven't once
complained. I know for a *fact* that users of many other language
wikis absolutely love the feature.
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.
We have established that you would like some sort of user preference.
We have established that you do not like CSS.
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 really find this hilarious, and I'm not being rude here...it's the
*editors* who were pushing for the longest time for us to implement a
lot of conditionals, etc. and other "fancy features" to use in markup.
And eventually, after much protesting of a point that is very much
like yours, we caved in, and it was implemented.
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
Of what use is the minor edit marker? Of what use are edit summaries,
really? How can you be absolutely certain what happened in an edit
without viewing the diff?
You can't. Like edit summaries and like minor edit flags, this
information is PURELY ADVISORY. As I've said somewhere else; we offer
factual information - WHO changed WHAT, WHEN they did it, and HOW MUCH
they appear to have changed. We then offer information that the user
is trusted to provide - namely WHAT THEY CHANGED and WHY, and whether
they consider it IMPORTANT.
If you don't personally see a benefit to this, fine. But we've been
asked to implement it for some time, by several different users, and
we've implemented it. Apparently *someone* finds it useful.
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
As above, edit summaries are only advisory; automatic edit summaries
should be viewed more as a cover-up for laziness or momentary
forgetfulness than as the output of some fantastic artificial
intelligence engine.
You are entitled to suggest further improvements to any aspect of
MediaWiki, including ideas for the types of additional automatic edit
summaries we could plausibly provide. You know, I think, where to make
this suggestion.
[Side note for anyone actually following this thread: I really hate
arguing with people before the end of a year, as I always like to kid
myself that I can make a fresh start in the next. This issue is
dragging on and on, and both sides are essentially regurgitating the
same opinions. I welcome any third party review on my attitude (feel
free to email it to me) if it has been inappropriate during this
particular thread.]
Rob Church