User:Pengo/rants

Pengo's guidelines, technical problems, and rants about Wikipedia, Wikimedia and MediaWiki. They are not in any particular order, and the intended audience varies between items. Please leave any comments on the talk page, or my talk page.

&lt;rant&gt;

Super-packed linking
I cringe when I see super-packed linking. For example: instead of the elegant and simple:
 * Ancient Greek comedy
 * Ancient Greek comedy

Licensing on user pages
User pages, user talk, and images on user pages should not be licensed under a free-content license, or should not be required to be so. For example, a user should not have to license a photo of him or herself under GFDL to have it appear on his or her userpage. There is no benefit to Wikipedia or its users to having its user space content licensed for use by anyone other than the page owner and Wikimedia. Of course copyright-infringing images should still not be allowed. And user templates could benefit from a free-content license.

GFDL Licensing
The GFDL has problems, and Wikipedia should have started making all new contributions dual licensed with a Creative Commons license long ago. While there would only be small benefits to making new content on the English Wikipedia dual licensed with a Creative Commons license, there would be a huge benefit to dual licensing smaller language Wikipedias, which could have virtually all their content under a more suitable license if they changed now.

Standardised licensing templates
There really ought to be some standardisation on the names of licensing templates across wikis.

Examples: works great in the fr: namespace, but I can only guess the exact meaning. If I want to copy an image from fr: to en: then I'd need to recreate this template (assuming it were a valid license).

redundant image works on en: but not commons:. I could re-create the template, but would anyone be watching for it?

Navigation popups
Navigation popups are very handy and often requested. There should be an option in the user's settings to turn them on (a simple checkbox). Anonymous users should also be able to turn them on (without logging on), e.g. through a cookie holding the setting.

Wikibureaucracy
Wikipedia is a bureaucracy and suffers many of the same problems as any other bureaucracy. The main criticisms are poor division of responsibility, inflexibility, and lack of leadership and vision. Main article: Wikipedia:Wikibureaucracy.

Allow anonymous users to start their own user pages
It seemed clearly obvious to me that when policy came in place barring anonymous users from creating new artciles, that it was only a mistake that stopped them from also editing their own user page. However speaking out against this obvious error I discovered how vehemently Wikipedians will defend whatever arbitrary rules have been created for them. Main article: Allow anonymous users to start their own user pages

Sysop/Admin reviews
Admins should undergo periodic peer review.

Cross site logins
Sister-site logins should work across all wikis. For example, it should be possible for User:Pengo to login to the chinese wiki as en:Pengo. There's a proposal for this somewhere.

Deleted images without a trace
The MediaWiki software needs to be fixed so that some trace is left after an image is deleted. Namely:
 * Relevant entries from the Deletion log should be visible from the delete image's page.
 * Including who deleted the image and why
 * A place for feedback regarding the deletion. Asking users to "go find an admin" is in poor form.
 * The original text associated with the image should be viewable/accessible (e.g. in the history, or as a link from the deletion log entries)
 * Users involved in uploading the image, and/or seeking permission for its use, need to be informed of what image was deleted and why, preferably with warning.

Update: Since image undeletion is now possible, this is less of an issue.

Exercise care when deleting images
Anyone involved in tagging or deletion of images, whether a human or bot has the responsibility to:
 * Read the text associated with the image
 * If it's a bot, then it must ask its human owner to read any associated text for it before it does anything.
 * For orphaned images, check where the image was previously linked, if you can't do that (due to limitations of wikimedia not presently allowing it), then try searching for the article with the image's name. Example: the article Pengo was renamed to Pengo (game). This broke an image tag which was used from within a template that relied on the article name. That is, changing the name of the article also inadvertently changed the image link from Image:Pengo.gif to Pengo (game).gif. As nothing now pointed to Pengo.gif it was deleted. This image has never been recovered. If the admin had opened the "pengo" article instead of deleting the image, the broken link may have been found and corrected instead.
 * Wikimedia must make it possible to check where an image was previously or recently linked from.
 * For "unsourced" images: Check if there are other images on the same page that are obviously from the same source. Check what other images the uploader has uploaded, if they might have the same source as the "unsourced" image. Counter example: Recently 2 images were deleted from a gallery on the $100 laptop article. From a glace it is obvious these images are all from the same source. However as the uploader (may have&mdash;I can't tell) left off source information, these images were deleted. I wish I could blame a stupid bot, but it seems to be human admins who are being careless.

Remember that reverting mistakes is easy for text. Reviving deleted images (or even working out what happened to them) is a pain. Exercise care!

Voting between people or things
When there is a choice of more than one person or thing to choose between in a vote (e.g. for a new logo, or a choice of board member), first past the post voting should be abandoned. Other voting systems are much more fair.

Using the current system where people get a single vote, it means that voting for someone (or something) unpopular is like throwing your vote away. First-past-the-post also means similar choices take votes away from each other, rather than from the opposition.

For an extremely POV example, the logo competition for Wikinews had a bunch of creative ideas and one very plain boring idea for a new logo. Boring people chose the boring idea, and interesting people spread their votes between all the creative ones. I'm sure there were plenty of people, like me, who would have chosen 10 of the creative ones before the boring one, but the boring one won. Other voting systems allow a second, third, or fourth preference. So assuming all the "interesting" people put all the creative logos before the boring logo, the result would have been that all the interesting votes would have found their way to a single creative logo, which would then have challenged the mundane logo that we see today.

The above story, is of course greatly exagerated and only intended to illustrate. There was actually more than one boring logo (although one was clearly a much better boring than the others), and it's completely plausable that the current logo would have won in any other system of voting. Besides, my point here is not that WikiNews has a boring logo, nor that the first-past-the-post voting is unfair, but that we should look to voting systems that are more fair, and that are better representative of Wikipedians.

There seem to be a lot of other voting systems, and implementing one would not be difficult. Users simply state the order of preferences, and someone makes a bot to collect up the data and sort it all out into a nice table or something. Ok, there's some coding work to be done there, and some attitudes to change to get it to work. Not to mention actually choosing between the alternate voting systems.

Voting for a person or thing
For votes on something like featured picture candidates, votes should be hidden until the end of the voting session. Comments perhaps should be visible, but not actual Support and Oppose votes. It's too easy to agree with everyone else, or to not vote because others are already voting the same way you would, leading to skewed and unmeaningful tallys.

A poor solution
A partial solution, which I hope inspires a better one:


 * Create two identical looking templates for each vote. For example, one template named


 * Template:Change_voting_system/Support

where "Change_voting_system" is the name of what they'e voting on, and the other named


 * Template:Change_voting_system/Oppose.

During voting both templates are set to look identical, so instead of +'s and -'s, we see just tally marks for the number of votes.

People add their votes with Change_voting_system/Support or Change_voting_system/Oppose, which, after they've voted appears only as a tally mark:


 * Change voting system: [[Image:Symbol opinion vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol opinion vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol opinion vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol opinion vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol opinion vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol opinion vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol opinion vote.svg|16px]]

When voting is over, someone goes and changes the templates to show +'s and -'s:


 * Change voting system: [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|16px]][[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|16px]]

and the votes are counted.

The problem is, of course, that anyone who hits "edit page" can see a list of Support and Oppose. And that's why this is a partial solution and not a complete one.

To complete this solution, we could protect the page so that only additions are allowed, and no one can see the source of what is there. That's not very wikipediaish, and if you're going to have to code something then you might as well implement a proper voting system.

Some things to consider:
 * Users wish to leave comments and explain their vote, this is important for feedback also, and needs to be kept in the voting process
 * Stopping non-voting comment sessions from appearing like voting. E.g. just saying "I agree" to another comment is not a constructive comment, but more like a vote.
 * Preventing or hi-liting when users votie twice
 * Hi-liting dubious votes such as possible sock puppets

Phylogenetic classification of species
We should be thinking about phylogenetic systematics. Currently animals are classified in beautiful pink taxoboxes. They are classified using traditional procedures into classes, families and other such nonsense, where the classes of amphibians, reptiles, bony fish, birds and mammals all live together side by side on the one class level in a hoopskirt and frockcoat fantasy fairyland of 19th century taxonomy. Let's face facts. We know now that birds diverged from reptiles, and amphibians from fish. They're not the same level. Let's not kid ourselves or the readers of Wikipedia about these relationships. The traditional system is neat and ordered, but also fails to reflect knowledge gained from molecular data and other research. We don't have the knoledge (yet) to order the whole tree of life in this way, but can we at least hint at the sucessive dichotomous branchings from single sister groups?

Solutions:
 * I don't know. Cladograms in taxoboxes? Better descriptive text? A link in taxoboxes to the cladistics article (it's featured, you know)? Ignore the problem and just work on species-level articles?

Bad solutions:
 * A very ugly solution, with a template I created:

Userspace
There are few benefits to be gained by applying the NPOV rule to the user name space. The same goes for template space, when templates are not used in articles.

An exception, possibly, is in the extreme case of the promotion of violence (such as racial violence). However. in such an extreme case, censoring the user space should only occur on a case-by-case basis, if at all.

Deletion of articles
The history of articles which have been deleted should remain visible to all users unless it was deleted for copyvio reasons. This would mean articles could be considered deleted simply if they are blanked, as they could be restored again easily.

Templates are a Good Thing
Templates get us closer to a Semantic MediaWiki. If they slow down the servers, that's a technical problem to be addressed by MediaWiki programmers. The use of templates should be taught and encouraged.

Finding templates
Finding the right template is notoriously difficult.

Some solutions:
 * Context-specific help. e.g. advice on what templates are available when
 * Better "See also" help in existing templates
 * Help pages detailing categories of templates, and how to's
 * Images used mostly in templates should have (on their image description page) a mention and link of the associated templates. In the text, that is, and not just in the "what links here" garbage.
 * Templates that are available across different wiki sites should say so, and those that aren't should say so too.
 * A "favourites list" (like, or combined with, the watchlist), so users can create a palette of templates they wish to use, that can then be selected from when editing pages.

How to link here
Linking to articles on other Wikimedia sites is difficult if you don't know what you're doing. The toolbox should contain an item named:
 * "How to link here" which gives you:
 * The URL of the article
 * The URL of the current version of the article (Permanent link)
 * How to link (same wiki) e.g. Cheese
 * How to link (from other wiki) e.g. fr:Discuter:Fromage ]] (if you're looking at the french Talk:Cheese page)
 * How to create a wiki-translation link. e.g. "Place Cheese at the end of the other-language cheese articles."
 * How to link to the current version of this article (from within Wikipedia): fr:Discuter:Fromage Version du 7 février 2006 à 20:05 (as there's no special wiki-syntax this, it is just an URL with a description)
 * An example of how to cite the article in a paper
 * The boilerplate copyright/licensing text to use if you are republishing the article (or parts thereof)
 * How to create a #redirect to the current page, and in which wikis the redirect is allowed or will work. (e.g. "This redirect will only work from within the English wiki" or "You can redirect to this commons image from any of the xyz.wikipedia's, although I dont know why you would")

Images would have further, or different linking help outlining:
 * how to insert an image into an article
 * how to link to it without inserting it
 * if the image is very large, a warning not to inline the image at its full size
 * how to use an image from one wiki site on another (which may be simple enough (if it's a commons image), or may be a pain (requiring the user to download the image and then re-upload it elsewhere, and maintain copyright/licensing templates which may be different in different languages, and then create a link back to the original image and author, and then watch in case the original image gets replaced by a better, updated version and keep the two in sync, ...but that's a whole different rant).

Namespace strings in search box
Typing: fr:Fromage in the search box and hitting Go should take me to fr:Fromage. It doesn't.

Wikipedia syntax inconsistancy
Double brackets, and , work well for inline links (links within text). Why they're also used for out-of-line interwiki links (e.g. for the list of available translations) and for categories, I don't know.

Using the same syntax for all these things means making inline links to interwiki articles and to categories is more difficult, requiring a new syntax for the same conceptual idea, while out-of-line links get the same syntax for a different conceptual idea.

Image syntax like this: is fine for inlining an image, but  should only display the text "Fish" (linking to the image). This would be consistant with normal linking syntax. Likewise should display the text "P1070042.JPG" as a link to the image.

The |thumbs| and |right| style of syntax is a bit dodgy, but I won't rant about that yet.

Unfortunately the syntax is well ingrained in many users now, and changing it now would be difficult. I currently have proposed no solution.

Wikipedia does not scale
A way for individual articles to be forked, and then merged again, should be possible. This would imply allowing multiple histories to be merged. Any web site should be able to take an article from Wikipedia, post it on their own site, have it edited on their own site, and then merge it back (1) without losing their edit history (nor the edit history that has since occured on the main site); and (2) respecting further edits that have been made on the main article, allowing managing of conflicts.

This would allow multiple versions of Wikipedia to coexist. It would allow the making of a "stable" branch of Wikipedia (free of vandalism, although slightly dated). It would allow web sites wishing to use pages from Wikipedia to contribute back, while maintaining control of their pages. Also possible would be spinoffs that did not follow the encyclopedic rules, such as a 'pedia of stories and opinions based around wikipedia content which could continually take in new changes, and maybe even occassionally give back too. And of course all those things you couldn't possibly imagine that you get with a new extensible platform.

It would also be a large technical challenge, although could possibly piggyback on an existing open source distributed version control system (which unfortunately seem to be mostly in their infancy).

These ideas are also somewhat similiar to Mark Shuttleworth's vision for Ubuntu and inter-distribution source code sharing through branches.

Watchlists are too adhoc for vandalism checking
Watchlists and recent changes lists are too adhoc for vandalism checking. There is much duplication of work as many many people will check some articles, while other articles are missed. The duplication of checking gets worse as Wikipedia grows.

Solution: A task-based approach is needed, where, for example, users can request 5 recently modified articles to be checked for vandalism. Multiple users could receive the same article, but it would be less adhoc.

Permission received status
If the Wikimedia foundation has received an email regarding permission to use an image, this should be indicated on the image's page as a flag.

Jimbo is not God
Think for yourselves. You may disagree with Jimbo.

Disambiguation style
The disambig notices are incredibly dull and ugly. They should be adorned with this little forking icon, as used by much of the rest of non-English Wikipedia.
 * Update: this has finally happened. Yay.

Gallery image-size preferences
There should be a preference setting for the size of gallery image thumbs. This could possibly be combined with the Thumbnail size preference which already exists.

User-choice sizes
There should be a template to get access to certain preferences. Especially the values for:
 * "Thumbnail size"
 * "Limit images on image description pages to"

e.g.
 * e.g. should give 150
 * should give the max X dimension size in pixels for image.jpg.

Stub notices
A stub notice is not part of an article. It belongs on the talk page, not the article page, just like any other metadata (information about the article, which does not make up the article itself)



Userboxes
To assume userboxes will have a negative impact on Wikipedia, can only mean you are not assuming good faith.

However, while I am completely opposed to anyone deleting templates ("userboxes") that are used by Wikipedians for free expression, those Wikipedians who actually care that their userboxes are being deleted should learn to write about themselves in prose instead of in userbox notation. They should then go on complaining about the inappropriate application of Wikipedia rules designed for articles to what can only be described as not wikipedia articles. Users are not articles. NPOV does not apply. Templates help us move towards a semantic wikipedia. The best thing for Wikipedia is to have happy, expressive Wikipedians. And assume good faith.

And if you're still upset about userboxes, and you can't work out how to write about yourself with prose, or even poetry, then change your username to something that makes your opinion clear. They can take away your userboxes, but they can't take away your name. So forget your old username and become User:Kurdish Mormon Scientologist Trombonist, and rejoice in your free expression.

Grammar

 * Clarity over consistency: Use serial comma or not, depending on which is more clear and easy to read. Switching styles in the middle of an article (or paragraph) is not an error. That said, in all honesty, I am a serial commaist.

Blocking IP address
Even users who created their account a long time ago and have never been banned are prevented from editing when their ISP lands them a Blocked IP. This is just stupid, and thankfully it's getting fixed. Sometime soon I hope. There have been many creative policy-based solutions on allowing new users to sign up from banned IP ranges too. See: WP:BPP and Bug 550 (there have been half a dozen duplicate bugs filed since this one)

Update: Now fixed.

Conservation status
The way to specify the conservation status of an animal is horrible. Within the taxobox you put this:

| status = 

And if you have a terrible memory like mine you find yourself constantly looking up the name of templates name for endangered or vulnerable species. Ok this isn't really a rant, it's something I've already fixed. Now you can use the IUCN code:

| status = EX | extinct = 1936

The new system is compatible with the old (template-status still works too).

Here's the first animal I converted to the new system:

Editing the taxobox template, used by tens of thousands of pages is mildly scary. A lot of potential to break a lot of pages. I copied the template to a private page to work on it where I could test changes in issolation... at least mostly I did. Also I tried to do it all in one edit. It's probably not the best thing for Wikipedia's overworked servers to have all the species and taxa be purged from its caches, as happens after each edit. I ended up going back to make it better a few times. So I felt a little guilty about it, until I was looking through the taxobox template's history, and found a long revert war, of all things, over the border color. Nuff said.

and recursive subst
I need a

I'd like to use  as a subst, so it would have no cache performance penalties. But first i'd need a recursive subst (which subst'd a template's templates).

Using would be good enough, except it includes  these brackets. I could use a linkless perhaps called :


 * could be another syntax.

Recursive subst
You can't do a resursive subst, but you can make a template that forces a subst:


 *  

Blabbering vaguarities
If you need to write an introduction to a topic like this:
 * As with any set of beliefs, opinions regarding the validity of particular x beliefs differ —points of view on these subjects vary widely.

or this:
 * The word x can have very different meanings depending on the background of the person speaking or the context in which the word is used.

or like:
 * Almost every adult living today in modern Western society is aware of the phenomena of x. Few, however, seem to know where it comes from or what causes it. Conventional explanations on this subject trace the origin of x back to innovations in technology. Technological innovations can be traced back to new ideas in the minds of their inventors. However, the origin of x is not well known.

or even:
 * X is a word used in two major sets of ways, which are inter-connected in a complex way, for reasons related to the history of science and metaphysics, particularly in Western Civilization.

or: X is a term with multiple meanings that has changed with time, place and observer, and is thus resistant to a single encompassing meaning.

then you probably don't need to write anything at all. Find a way to summarise the meanings or beliefs to draw them together instead of stuttering this meaningless nonsense. (These examples all taken from, at the time of writing, current Wikipedia pages)

Systemic POV and Notability

 * Now a proposal: Utility

Admins delete "non notable" articles. What is counted as "not notable" is inherently POV. Images can also push a POV by picking a misleading expression or an angle.

The criteria for article deletion should revolve around the article's utility, rather than its notability.

Someone once made a suggestion to have referenced notability things. It seems even more crazy.

Redirects

 * Main article: User:Pengo/R

I made a suggestion to rename the special Redirect templates in August 2005. Renaming of R with possibilities has come up again, so I've dug up my original suggestion for renaming these pages.

AfD vs Incubator
Instead of deleting "non-notable" articles, they should be put in an "incubator" until such a time as the subject becomes notable. e.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubator:Some_Micro_Bewery. This way potentually useful information isn't needlessly deleted, but "non-notable" subjects and fan cruft don't "clutter" wikipedia, and a myriad of topic-specific wikis don't need to be created.

Note: "Incubator" here does not refer to the wikimedia incubator.

Ref in templates
The ref tag is great, but it doesn't play well with templates. Something to do with the parsing order. I've made a test case for this bug here: User:Pengo/pageusingref. Unfortunately it doesn't look like it will be fixed in time for the updating of a zillion taxoboxes.

Living person biographies
Fuzzy Zoeller has filed a lawsuit against Josef Silny & Associates, Inc. for adding false statements to his Wikipedia biography. The following are articles from various news agencies about the situation: Miami Herald, Herald Tribune, Web Pro News, The Smoking Gun.

Having read the defamatory (inflammatory) statements, I find them amusing and incredibly difficult to take seriously. But fair enough that Zoeller doesn't like them being said. I'd like to be able to simply say that anyone who took the drug abuse comments seriously was at fault for being so stupid as to take them seriously. Seriously.

The situation seems pretty clear (someone wrote some crap on Wikipedia, someone else didn't like it, it got removed), who's at fault is less clear, and I'm happy to leave that to the courts to decide. I'm not so big on litigation-happy American society, which seeks payouts over restorative justice. I hardly think a lawsuit will improve the lives of any of the parties involved any more than a handshake a "sorry" would. This case, by itself, surely will not have a huge affect on Wikipedia, but it does appear to be part of a growing trend of people getting upset about what's written about them on Wikipedia (and it's certainly not the first case). What's more important than settling this case is to put in place measures to stop further cases popping up, regardless whether they are blaming the article's authors or Wikipedia.

It seems punitive or draconian measures will need to be taken to keep biographies of living persons free of unsourced nonsense. I don't care whether this is Jimbo's "Zero information is preferred to misleading or false information" policy, or whether editors of living persons articles are required to use their real name, or have additional terms and conditions, or if they are required to send in a video of themselves making the edit with a DNA barcode tattooed to their forehead, whatever. As long as, and "I cannot emphasize this enough", these measures don't affect the people editing the rest of Wikipedia.

Jimmy Wales made a call to delete 90% of material on Wikipedia because of living person biographies:


 * "I can NOT emphasize this enough. There seems to be a terrible bias among some editors that some sort of random speculative 'I heard it somewhere' pseudo information is to be tagged with a 'needs a cite' tag. Wrong. It should be removed, aggressively, unless it can be sourced. This is true of all information, but it is particularly true of negative information about living persons.

This overarching ass-covering is ridiculous. Jimbo is constantly on the defensive regarding living people, and while I find it unfortunate, I only hope the measures that are put in place to combat it do not spread to other articles.

As you can probably tell, I don't edit living persons biographies myself. And I find the whole situation is laughable. Far greater crimes committed on Wikipedia include:


 * the addition of a made-up tuna species
 * the lack of information on the majority of the 16000+ known species threatened with extinction
 * that no one wrote anything on Wikipedia on the De Yuan Yu ships which trawled 7000kg of Australian reef fish, and that the Sea Shepherd's article has no mention of their recent encounter with Japanese whalers (which was plastered all over the news), and there's not even an article on "fishery collapse".

You get the idea. (and before you say, sofixit, I'm working on it, but I have a long list.)

—Pengo 21:59, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

Immature usurpation policy
Wikipedia is a large, mature web site, catering to a large number of users of different backgrounds. However, its new policies regarding usurpation of accounts are poorly considered. Namely, the current usurpation policy does not consider users who have made no edits, but still use an account to read Wikipedia. Such users, who may have built considerable watchlists, or have set preferences to their liking (for example so the interface is in another language) may find themselves being asked if their account name may be taken over even if they are logging in regularly.

It's not a common scenario, it's perhaps not likely to happen often, and it's very possible that the user will login in time to ask that their account not be deleted. However, it's a very poorly considered policy that allows an active user to be considered possibly inactive in the first place.

Admins or bureaucrats need the ability to check if an account truly is inactive for the purpose of usurpation, and only then should the account owner be attempted to be contacted. Going only by lack of edits is incredibly unprofessional and juvenile, and I'm embarrassed to be part of a community that would use such crude methods.

I propose that an account be marked inactive if: no edits have been made, the watchlist is empty, the preferences are still default, AND the user has not logged in for 3 months. To avoid privacy concerns, none of these (except edits) should be checkable by anyone (admin, bureaucrat or otherwise). Rather, the system can report a user as simply "active" or "inactive" (= "fair game for usurpation"). Also, an admin will need to actively request the the status of a user, and that request may be logged.

It's a small, trivial thing, but if we don't want to cause a poor user experience then it's something that needs to be fixed. Yes, it would take a little coding, but the system as it stands is just too crude to be taken seriously. —Pengo 02:22, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Synth
[{WP:SYNTH]] is insulting to Wikipedia editors and readers. Taken to the extreme, editors cannot say that 10 is a larger number than 5 unless they have a specific citation for this specific fact. Otherwise it is "original research". This is idiocy.

Maths introductions in English please
This is English Wikipedia, and at the risk of sounding like an arrogant Western tourist in the Japanese country side, can you (authors of maths articles) please write in ENGLISH? (see full rant...)


 * Example of a well written math article: Spectral sequence

Please leave comments on the talk page, or on my talk page.

&lt;/rant&gt;