On 1/1/07, Omegatron 9ybf94w02@sneakemail.com wrote:
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 you want Rob disciplined or something for being rude, go ahead and talk to Brion.
Shouldn't that have been implemented *before* going live with this feature?
No, because nobody thought that anyone would actually object significantly. When we think that, we're usually right, but there are bound to be occasional exceptions.
What's a Subversion log?
http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/?view=log
(takes forever to load . . . there's probably some option to restrict it, timespan-wise, so it's not like ten megabytes or whatever)
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.
Yeah, there is. Bugzilla. That most people don't follow it, we can't help.
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.
I've heard more people praising them than rejecting them. Actually, who aside from you really dislikes them?
Something like this should be a user preference.
No, it should not. Adding dozens and dozens of user preferences to account for every possible thing people might like will clutter the appropriate part of the interface and be a pain in the neck to maintain. Only the most common preferences should be available as checkboxes, and not when it's whether to display an extra few characters that users can ignore anyway.
We give users the power to implement their own advanced preferences via CSS and JavaScript. We're aware that most people can't use these by themselves, but that's unavoidable for such powerful features. If they really don't like something, they can always ask someone to write the CSS/JS for them for such a simple thing.
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.
In other words, display the diffs in compressed/truncated form on the history or watchlist page. That will frequently amount to a couple hundred characters or more. A few people have already grumbled about clutter on Special:Newpages; this would be much worse. That is something I would definitely say should be an option on the page to display or not, and/or a user preference.
But it's a different request. Please file it on Bugzilla.