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.

[UC_Bill]

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.

Nah, I usually only use language like that when it's prohibited. There's no WR:CIVIL here to contend with, right?

First off, THANK YOU ALL for actually reading what was going on, and acknowledging the entire chain of events that led up to my ranting.

Now, a little bit of defending myself.. I don't usually (and didn't then) get angry over the technical issues. I got increasingly irritated over the whole dates thing because it was clear to me that the people arguing with me were trying to game the system, and were either intentionally misunderstanding my points or were intentionally misrepresenting them. Yeah, I know, I'm preaching to the choir on that one. I wish I'd found this site earlier, it would've done me good to have realized just how much of a game Wikipedia had become, and who the key players were.

As for the Nancy Cartwright thing, and about disambiguation in general, I think the best solution is to have each person's article be one of the qualified forms (i.e. "John Smith (porn actor)") and for the disambiguation page to be "John Smith (disambiguation)" -- and then for the bare name "John Smith" to be a redirect to whichever is most appropriate. I'm not saying that should always be the disambiguation page, I'm just saying that the bare name itself should never be the location of an actual article, unless there's only one article. Visitors would still get to the "most popular" page (or the disambiguation page if it's a toss-up) by using the bare name; they'd just do so via a redirect.

Why? Because then the arguments over where the bare name page should redirect to can be held in a single location. If people edit war over it, it causes much less disruption because the links from other articles won't need to change. It makes it less likely that people will link to the wrong article, or that links will need to be updated if there's suddenly a second famous person with a previously unique name. In short, it eliminates most of the reasons for people to fight, and makes the fights less disruptive to the rest of the site.

...which I now realize is probably the whole reason people oppose those kinds of suggestions, whenever I've made them. People on WP don't want to eliminate the fights. For many of them, the fights seem to be the whole point.

It was the same situation with the date formatting. I came along and found people arguing over whether dates should be linked or not, how they should (or shouldn't) be formatted, etc. As a developer, the obvious solution (to me) is to make such things into user preferences, so people can just specify their choices and see things how they want. Now, there are definitely problems with the way date autoformatting was implemented previously, but they're all able to be fixed. But people don't actually want them fixed. I get it now. I wish I'd gotten it earlier.

Which brings me to my last point. I got into even more trouble on WP after the events mentioned in this thread, and am now effectively banned from the project. And that's fine.. toward the end, I started to become really frightened by the stalking that was being made possible by the site and (unfortunately) some of those in charge. That has been rectified and nearly all personally identifying information of mine has been removed from the site. But it opened my eyes to just how dangerous Wikipedia is, due to the difficulty in controlling access to one's private personal details.

So I'm wondering if this site (and other places frequented by ex-Wikipedians or people smart enough to have never become Wikipedians in the first place) could serve as a kind of home base for "rescue operations" to let people know about the dangers involved, even just the dangers to their own sanity. Once somebody has violated The Rules at WP, it's practically impossible for them to delete their personal information, since it's then considered "evidence" that must be preserved at all costs.

Or maybe it's just more fun to point and laugh. Which I admit seems like a lot of fun.

[Somey]

Nah, I usually only use language like that when it's prohibited. There's no WR:CIVIL here to contend with, right?

Not really, no. But that doesn't mean we're masochists, though...

First off, THANK YOU ALL for actually reading what was going on, and acknowledging the entire chain of events that led up to my ranting.

This is what we're here for! (Some of us, anyway...)

Your position on the disambiguation pages makes a lot of sense, to me at least. Unfortunately, you ran into The Simpsons Contingent, who are probably right up there with the Trekkie Contingent and the Stargate Contingent (example, diff) when it comes to defending their turf.

The date formatting issue seems more problematic to me - I'm all for user preferences myself, but there are other considerations - chiefly due to the issue of translating plaintext into WikiML and back again. Personally, I could probably go either way, and I should point out (for the umpteenth time, yada yada) that I don't actually have a WP user account, so the what's-the-default problem would also apply to me - assuming I cared all that much what the dates look like.

So I'm wondering if this site (and other places frequented by ex-Wikipedians or people smart enough to have never become Wikipedians in the first place) could serve as a kind of home base for "rescue operations" to let people know about the dangers involved, even just the dangers to their own sanity. Once somebody has violated The Rules at WP, it's practically impossible for them to delete their personal information, since it's then considered "evidence" that must be preserved at all costs.

That has happened before - there are a few WP admins (Alison, Lar, One/CHL, etc.) who read WR and are sympathetic to that sort of thing. There are also some who aren't, but I think I can at least say that they're a good deal less popular.

That's not to say we reject any and all efforts to identify WP'ers, though - especially high-ranking, potentially controversial ones, if there's clear evidence that they're doing bad things. (Note that "bad things" does not mean mere sock-puppetry and habitual incivility, which most of us IMO see as inherent to the system.) Just remember, it's a discussion board, not an activist organization, even though it may seem like the latter at times!

[UC_Bill]

The date formatting issue seems more problematic to me - I'm all for user preferences myself, but there are other considerations - chiefly due to the issue of translating plaintext into WikiML and back again. Personally, I could probably go either way, and I should point out (for the umpteenth time, yada yada) that I don't actually have a WP user account, so the what's-the-default problem would also apply to me - assuming I cared all that much what the dates look like.

Yep, I agree completely, and that's why I ended up dropping my opposition to the date delinking and started producing database reports on the pages that had the worst problems with date formats.

If the autoformatting opponents had made the argument about markup earlier on, or had stuck with it consistently (instead of using it as just one randomly thrown-in point in their internally inconsistent arsenal of counter-arguments) then things probably would have gone very differently.

My views on markup in general (and date markup in particular) is that MediaWiki should switch to using offset annotation, rather than inline annotation. In other words, novice editors (or anyone who hates markup) could edit pages that were essentially plain text, with just the minimum of formatting syntax (bullet points, section headers, bold, etc.) and leave the extra markup for somebody else to edit. That would involve some significant changes to the way data is stored in the database, and some clever methods for handling changes in text (most likely just flagging a given annotation layer as "stale" and waiting for an editor to fix that layer, like how edit conflicts are handled but without the immediacy) but it's totally do-able, and would make it so people could have as many annotation layers as they want (within reason) and nobody would have to deal with extra syntax if they didn't want to.

[Eva Destruction]

My views on markup in general (and date markup in particular) is that MediaWiki should switch to using offset annotation, rather than inline annotation. In other words, novice editors (or anyone who hates markup) could edit pages that were essentially plain text, with just the minimum of formatting syntax (bullet points, section headers, bold, etc.) and leave the extra markup for somebody else to edit. That would involve some significant changes to the way data is stored in the database, and some clever methods for handling changes in text (most likely just flagging a given annotation layer as "stale" and waiting for an editor to fix that layer, like how edit conflicts are handled but without the immediacy) but it's totally do-able, and would make it so people could have as many annotation layers as they want (within reason) and nobody would have to deal with extra syntax if they didn't want to.

Is that not what Template:Wikify does? There's nothing to stop someone contributing in plain text in Mediawiki (just hang round contributions by new accounts for a while and you'll see it) – it gets tagged, and someone else (theoretically) comes along and fixes the formatting. Sure, there's a backlog, but there'd be just the same backlog using offset annotation.

[UC_Bill]

Is that not what Template:Wikify does? There's nothing to stop someone contributing in plain text in Mediawiki (just hang round contributions by new accounts for a while and you'll see it) – it gets tagged, and someone else (theoretically) comes along and fixes the formatting. Sure, there's a backlog, but there'd be just the same backlog using offset annotation.

Sorry, I realized afterwards that I was being too vague.

With offset annotation, you're basically seeing different versions of the text (even while editing) depending on which annotation layer is being applied.

So novice editors could edit an article -- any article -- and see nothing but plain text with some minimal formatting syntax. Their edits wouldn't affect the other layers at all, except to change the offsets (i.e. if some words are inserted between the 150th and 157th characters in the text, the start and end points for anything coming after that point in a different layer would need to be moved accordingly.)

Editors who wanted to tag dates in the text could turn on the dates annotation layer, which would show them the article text with the same minimal markup -- but now with some additional markup for the dates.

It's the separation of everything into different layers that really makes it work, and which would require a lot of changes to the MediaWiki code (and database setup) but it would eliminate the "keep the syntax simple" vs. "semantic metadata" arguments, once and for all. The need to have all the markup for every kind of semantic entity all in one file is a consequence of using inline annotation, and isn't at all necessary given a switch to offset annotation.