UC Bill Gianoed, Down goes a developer? Options

[Hipocrite]

UC_Bill (T-C-L-K-R-D) has a short temper. He's also, I believe, a developer.

He was just blocked indef, email blocked cannot edit own talk page for venting on his talk page after getting in a fight with Bart Simpson fans.

A must read.

[Somey]

Interesting case...

From what I can determine, UC Bill (T-C-L-K-R-D) hadn't really been involved in any serious "incivility" incidents until he entered into a dispute with Tony1 (T-C-L-K-R-D) on this Bugzilla ticket. The nastiness begins about halfway down, and to be frank, Tony1 actually starts it by referring to the idea of "normalizing" the appearance of auto-formatted dates as "hair brained" (i.e., not only does he not like the idea, he doesn't even know that the phrase is actually "hare-brained").

Tony1 doesn't like Date Autoformatting, and even has a section of his user page devoted to the subject (diff link). If I understand this correctly, his objection is that the automatic blue-links are "distracting" and that they "dilute" the impact of "high-value" links elsewhere in the articles in which they appear.

UC Bill apparently wrote a MediaWiki patch that would...

...cause linked dates to be rendered without the link, and in the same format as they appear in the wikicode (although it will add missing commas where appropriate) -- in other words, this patch completely nullifies date autoformatting. It is only intended for testing purposes, pending community approval of a proposal to temporarily disable date autoformatting to gauge editor response.

In other words, UC Bill offered a technical compromise that completely addressed Tony1's stated concerns, and did not assume it would be adopted without a test/trial period.

But Tony1 wasn't having it - this was when he responded on the Bugzilla page with the "hair brained" remark. UC Bill's compromise solution would have, essentially, threatened to put an end to Tony1's crusade to completely remove autoformatted dates from Wikipedia altogether. But interestingly, there was no further comment (or action on the ticket) for nearly a month after that. It was only when someone later asked if there had been any action on the ticket that things started to heat up.

When Tony1 tried to export the dispute onto Wikipedia itself, UC Bill tried to stop him, calling it "wikistalking."

Evidently, this experience soured things for UC Bill on Wikipedia to a considerable extent!

The Nancy Cartwright business started here, but that was actually one of numerous edits he'd made that day that were related to an attempt to clean up the "Philosophers" category. He probably didn't think it would be such a big deal, meaning he'd probably never really dealt with fans of The Simpsons prior to this incident.

Finally, just to clarify, UC Bill seems to be a MediaWiki developer, but not a WikiMedia (i.e., paid by WMF) Developer, i.e., his account does not have the "developer bit." Otherwise he would have been able to delete his user page himself, instead of having to threaten automated vandalism in order to get the page deleted.

[Kato]

Tony1 doesn't like Date Autoformatting, and even has a section of his user page devoted to the subject (diff link). If I understand this correctly, his objection is that the automatic blue-links are "distracting" and that they "dilute" the impact of "high-value" links elsewhere in the articles in which they appear.

Linking all those dates is one of the most cringe worthy elements of Wikipedia articles. It is utterly pointless, and usually means me clicking on a link by mistake and coming to some unhelpful article about a Year - then having to go back to the article.

[Somey]

Linking all those dates is one of the most cringe worthy elements of Wikipedia articles. It is utterly pointless, and usually means me clicking on a link by mistake and coming to some unhelpful article about a Year - then having to go back to the article.

So then, I wonder... if a person had to pass the mouse over the date to see that it was actually a link, would that make him/her more, or less likely to click on it by accident...? My guess is it probably wouldn't make all that much difference, but that's what trial periods are for, I suppose.

It just struck me that UC Bill was suggesting a compromise that would allow people to do pretty much whatever they wanted with dates, since they would always show up as ordinary black-on-white whether they were linked or not. If the only real objections are aesthetic ones, then this would actually reduce the amount of maintenance required, not increase it, at least in the short term - there would be no immediate need to change existing articles at all, right?

But often it seems like the only people on WP who care enough to even try and understand something like this (i.e., a "minor technical annoyance") are the ones who have a pet peeve about it, and for whom nothing but their preferred (and usually more drastic and labor-intensive) solution will do...

Obviously I say this at the risk of having UC Bill register here on WR to thank us for taking the trouble to check this stuff out, only to later have him call other members "dipshits" and "assholes" at the first sign of disagreement over some other trivial technical issue.

[Malleus]

It just struck me that UC Bill was suggesting a compromise that would allow people to do pretty much whatever they wanted with dates, since they would always show up as ordinary black-on-white whether they were linked or not. If the only real objections are aesthetic ones, then this would actually reduce the amount of maintenance required, not increase it, at least in the short term - there would be no immediate need to change existing articles at all, right?

But often it seems like the only people on WP who care enough to even try and understand something like this (i.e., a "minor technical annoyance") are the ones who have a pet peeve about it, and for whom nothing but their preferred (and usually more drastic and labor-intensive) solution will do...

The issue was only tangentially related to links, although overloading the link functionality to achieve date autoformatting was certainly one of the worst solutions I've ever seen to a problem that doesn't really exist. The complaint was that date autoformatting works fine for logged in users, but doesn't work for the vast majority, who don't have an account. What they see is a mishmash of date formats that's hidden from logged in editors, and thus rarely fixed.

Feeling sleepy yet?

This post has been edited by Malleus: Thu 26th March 2009, 6:43pm

[Kelly Martin]

The issue was only tangentially related to links, although overloading the link functionality to achieve date autoformatting was certainly one of the worst solutions I've ever seen to a problem that doesn't really exist. The complaint was that date autoformatting works fine for logged in users, but doesn't work for the vast majority, who don't have an account. What they see is a mishmash of date formats that's hidden from logged in editors, and thus rarely fixed.

I agree that the overloading of date formatting onto links was a bad solution to a real problem. They should have used some other syntax for it.

As to the dates not being shown in a satisfactory way to non-logged-on users, it shouldn't be that hard to add heuristics to guess the reader's locale (language preferences are automatically transmitted by the browser, for example, and there are other ways to get hints) and render dates in the appropriate format based on that best-guess. Unfortunately, that breaks the Foundation's "solution" to the problem that Mediawiki is horribly, horribly inefficient: massively aggressive caching.