UC Bill Gianoed, Down goes a developer? Options

[Peter Damian]

Can you imagine a work environment in which people are allowed, nay invited to turn up from the street and start 'helping' you with your work in a way that you would prefer them not to? Particularly when they clearly have no expertise in your line of work (though they imagine they do). And when you get exasperated and say "Why don't you go fuck yourself, you dipshit", one of the workplace security guards turns up and escorts you from the premisses. Can you imagine that? No, quite.

Everyone who deals with the public as part of their job has to deal with this - and a lot worse - every day.
Get serious, please.

I am perfectly serious. 'Dealing with the public' is not the same as having the public invited in to do your work for you. If I teach a group of people I have a professional duty to be polite and helpful, no matter what idiocy they come up with.

But for the analogy to hold, I would have to put up with the students taking the podium and correcting me at various points, making alterations to homework, marking exams and so on.

This is clearly quite different from 'dealing with the public'.

[Jon Awbrey]

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.

But the auto-eroticism of Wikipedia's link love is amplified thereby, and lots of self-linking leads to a solid Google ranking, so it's probably a done deal for a' that.

Jon

[Milton Roe]

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.

But the auto-eroticism of Wikipedia's link love is amplified thereby, and lots of self-linking leads to a solid Google ranking, so it's probably a done deal for a' that.

Jon

I used to think they were preparing some massive search feature of every linked date, so you could hit a button and find out WHAT HAPPENED ON THIS DATE in your favorite year. Or what else happened on the same day someplace else, like Lincoln and Darwin being born within a few hours of each other. But no. That's not here, and so far as I can tell, nobody is working on anything like it. They just do it to use up WMF's blue electrons, which are evidently in over-supply (If I understand correctly how that stuff works. I think they squid-cache the little things in Florida somewhere).

[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.

[Sarcasticidealist]

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...

Yes. The date delinking controversy desperately needs the involvement of sane people, but involving yourself in that controversy is conclusive evidence of insanity.

Doc Daneeka would be so proud.

[CharlotteWebb]

[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.

Sounds like a win-win situation. Have you e-mailed him yet?

[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

[Apathetic]

He wanted to make an entirely unnecessary dab page when a hat would have been fine, and when people disagreed with him, resorted to swearing and verbally abusing people.

Nothing to see here?

This post has been edited by Apathetic: Thu 26th March 2009, 7:09pm

[Bottled_Spider]

The drama and lulz were very nice. And to be fair, I once told David Levy that he should win the Miss Wikipedia Drama Queen pageant, complete with sash and tiara. He didn't like that a whole lot.

Probably because your choices of regalia were insufficiently glamourous. Maybe he's a waist-chain and cloth-cap man.

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.

If he signed up using a really cool avatar and someone hacked his account and changed it to something "inappropriate" he could be forgiven.

[Milton Roe]

He wanted to make an entirely unnecessary dab page when a hat would have been fine, and when people disagreed with him, resorted to swearing and verbally abusing people.

Nothing to see here?

Yes, if you have two people named Nancy Cartwright, and the one is far more culturally notable (see "famous") than the other, a dab page doesn't make much sense as a thing to redirect to. You direct it to the more famous one with a "for other uses" tag on that. Whereas, if we get a third one, it may be a problem, but I've seen "for other uses" with two or even three directs, if they are minor ones. And of course you can direct the "for other uses" to the dab page. Which I think is actually the official policy if there's ONE clearly major use of a term, and many minor ones.

But the whole thing is very much the same computer-programmer mindset of people who really insist on the same logical tree for everything, even if that makes some feature you use everyday, 4 levels down in the logical drop-down menu. If we did everything the same on WP, everything of the same name that had more than one entry would direct to a dab, even if only had TWO entries. In practice, we're (usually) smarter than to do that.

[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.

[gomi]

Welcome to WR, Mr. ... er ... UC Bill! You might enjoy this avatar more than the one you selected, which is currently in use by Moulton, one of our more senior contributors.

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 is a perfectly reasonable thing to do here, though you expose yourself to additional retribution from the pro-Wikipedia types. We've had several incidents here were wiki-apologists and sycophants have attempted to reveal the personal information of the staff and members here, so exposing Wikipedia's dangers comes along with its own dangers, such as they are. We have a strict policy of not revealing anyone's address, phone number, or place of employment (please see the Rules posting). Also, bear in mind that this site is also searched by google, so things said here (with some exceptions, mostly noted here) will show up on a google search.

I think Wikipedia is an object lesson in what can happen to those without a firm grip on objective reality who become obsessed with the internal politics and dramas of the WP "community", such as it is. On the other hand, if Wikipedia wasn't the top search result for almost everything, no one would care -- it would just be another sad-sack web community like so many others. But chance and bad intent have led them to a position of prominence, from which no one is safe. I don't know if bad information has a more or less detrimental effect than wiki-obsession, but it's an interesting topic of discussion.

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

Don't forget how education that can be. Just because it's fun doesn't make it wrong!

[UC_Bill]

Welcome to WR, Mr. ... er ... UC Bill! You might enjoy this avatar more than the one you selected, which is currently in use by Moulton, one of our more senior contributors.

Thanks! Weren't you supposed to hack my account and change it that way, though?

[gomi]

Thanks! Weren't you supposed to hack my account and change it that way, though?

Well, I admit to considering it, but I figured I'd give you the chance first.

[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!

[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.

[everyking]

Date linking is dumb, and it was a mistake all along. UC Bill's proposal would have been all right as a compromise, I suppose. The incivility was outrageous and warranted a block, although it should have been subject to community review before implementation.

[Kelly Martin]

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.

Indeed. It is not "safe" to edit Wikipedia, as I've mentioned in my blog previously. It's probably best to pretend that Wikipedia content is created by random, inexplicable processes, since that makes slightly more sense than the process by which it is actually created, and leaves one less inclined to try to edit.

[UC_Bill]

Date linking is dumb, and it was a mistake all along. UC Bill's proposal would have been all right as a compromise, I suppose. The incivility was outrageous and warranted a block, although it should have been subject to community review before implementation.

Oh, totally agreed about the outrageousness of my rant. In fact in that particular instance the incivility was at least partly contrived, as I'd recently been through a lengthy debate on the talk page for WP:CIVIL itself, pointing out how civility blocks were essentially just profanity blocks, since if people were arguing it was almost invariably the one who cursed first that was blocked, regardless of the content of their messages otherwise. So really I should've been blocked for WP:POINT, which I think at least a few people suspected anyway.

My anger at the blocking admins was entirely authentic though.. I had about 50 tabs open in my browser, doing an assembly-line-style set of related edits to fix the categories for some pages that were on the "Wikipedia Backlog" page. As I finished my edits and was going through the tabs submitting each one, I got blocked and lost all that work. Very irritating.

My views on WP:CIVIL are that it should never be used as a reason for blocking anyone. I don't see how blocks help calm a situation down, and I don't buy into the argument that people need to be "protected" from being called names. We're talking about words here, not sticks and stones. The way to deal with incivility is to ignore it, and if WP had killfiles then there really wouldn't be a problem.

[Moulton]

My views on WP:CIVIL are that it should never be used as a reason for blocking anyone.

Bill, see this essay on the subject.