On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 2:17 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote: [...]
As far as i can tell, the arguments (on enwiki) usually boil down to: *providing a share this link is a tacit endorsement/free advertisement of a website we dont like. Selecting who to show could present neutrality issues
Exactly. This is the primary divisive aspect. * Do we include links to Everyone Who Asks? (There are dozens of options at http://www.sharethis.com/get-sharing-tools/ and ending up with http://i.imgur.com/XGJHLvW.png at the top of every page is the fear of many editors. We've seen those sites that end every blog post with a massive line of share-icons... It's aesthetically ugly, because the icons are all a mishmash of styles.) So, What Criteria would we use, to select the services that are given this significant endorsement? * Do we display All Links At Once (if there are a lot)? or just a few by default and the rest in an expanding section? * Do we select the same services globally, or let each language pick their own preferences? (e.g. Sina Weibo, QQ, Viber, etc). These issues are ripe for argument, which is one reason we avoid it altogether.
The* icons *are the second most divisive aspect. The proponents generally want to use or include the services' icons, because those are the most recognizable (and briefest, which is good!) way to link to them. But those icons are not CC-BY-SA (I'm not sure if this is relevant, but I recall it being mentioned). And they're VERY eyecatching/distracting, in our generally plain-text reading UI, which is the strongest objection.
I personally think that adding text-links (no icons) would be a reasonable step forward. That is what the Indonesian Wikipedia has done. I think a few other wikimedia wikis also include share links, in either the sidebar or the header?
All the existing extensions and scripts, and the few wikimedia wikis that already have some sort of "share" button, are (or should be) included at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Social_media_plugins That is probably the best place to summarize the pros/cons, and to list the past discussions, and the technical options.
[...]
Anyhow, this list is not the one you have to convince and i believe that historically user opinion has varried significantly from developer opinion on this issue.
+1