User talk:Xiong/tobydemo

Demo documentation
The sample page is, of course, Cultural Revolution. I marvel that an article that describes such bloody times has so few photos of bloodshed -- but then, Western media was pretty much forbidden the Middle Kingdom then, and the less said about the State media, the better. I should like the article illustrated somewhat more graphically.

That said, begin your tour of Simple Toby here. Presumably you got to this entrypoint into the Toby system through a sidebar link -- preferably a miniature Toby icon. You are presented with a simple choice: Toby or not Toby. You choose.

If you choose "No thanks, Toby" then you wind up on the unaltered article page. The End. Or hit your back button to play some more with Toby.

If you want Toby to watch for you, then you go to the sample Toby demo version of the same article. Note that all images have been replaced by gray regions. FWIW, these are not images themselves; they are simply empty gray spaces, the same size and shape as the images they replace. Original captions remain.

Additionally, a big Toby appears in the lower-left corner of your browser window. Now, when Mom, Teacher, Boss, or Parole Officer sticks his/her/its head in the door of your cubby, you can instantly point to Toby and say, "It's okay, Mom. Toby's watching." Your local overlord can see you did not just pull the switch, quickly covering those National Geographic photos with a Disney window. You may indeed be reading an article about naked women, but you're not seeing any. Your hands never touch the mouse.

So, Mom is gone and you decide to take a chance. Hey, it's a free country. It is way outside of Wikipedia's purview to lock you out. Maybe you just finally got released from your daily bondage and now you are relaxing at home. Click Toby and you come again to the choice: Toby or not Toby. You choose. The only difference is that Toby is already watching at this point.

Note also each image placeholder contains a link to this same decision page. An alternate implemenation would stick Toby's image right in the placeholder, but that seems very distracting and just plain bad graphic design. Instead, currently the demo uses a bullet ("•"). I could swear I once saw a Unicode "no-in-circle" once, but now I search for it in vain. I suppose we could have a very small, discreet, black symbol there. You choose.

To recap, the navigation path is: any page Foo &rarr; click sidebar link &rarr; Toby or not Toby &rarr; Foo minus images &rarr; click Toby or image placeholder &rarr; Toby or not Toby &rarr; Foo with images.

Can't get much simpler than that.

Implementation
I really do hope everyone understands that this is not the way we do it for real. This is only a demo. To make it happen, I gleefully hacked all over, with weird markup galore.

Ideally, once agree on what we want, we petition the development team to make it happen. '''We do not edit any pages over and over again. We do not maintain two versions of each page.''' Toby does it all.

I hope nobody is confused -- this is a demo of Simple Toby, not the full-blown original proposal, which may just be unnecessarily complex. Simple Toby turns all image display off, on every page, until you turn him back on again. (I use Cologne Blue skin, so naturally I didn't think of it at first -- but of course, Toby only suppresses output of content images, not the WP logo, etc.)

Discussion
Please, please, please keep the discussion here limited to my sorry-assed demo only. I'll fixit if I can. The right place to discuss the proposal is on Wikipedia talk:Toby/censored (if faint of heart) or Wikipedia talk:Toby/uncensored, if not. Thank You! &mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 14:04, 2005 August 27 (UTC)

Similar option
Rather than using Toby, what's wrong with a simple option in preferences? The navigation path would take the same number of steps, and the implementation could take a very uncontroversial position, like so:



It's not making any value judgement on whether images are bad, it's not explicitly linked on every page, but it would still be available on the preferences. Users who enabled this would save a bit of bandwidth, I imagine. The images would still be there, but as file names to click on, similar to the autofellatio page. -- Norvy (talk) 16:20, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
 * This is all very interesting, but it's a comment about the proposal, not about the demo itself. So, I'm putting it on the proposal talk pages, okay? Please talk there. No need to have yet another point for discussion, right? &mdash; Xiong &#29066; talk * 10:50, 2005 August 29 (UTC)