Wikipedia talk:Signature types

Feature idea and opinion

 * As I mentioned on the page this was originally proposed, I would think the formal sig should then include links to talk/contribs page, as these can actually be useful in such settings, as opposed to colors/symbols,etc, which I assume would be limited to the casual sig. (I know you (the creator) saw this comment already, just repeating for everyone else).
 * It is an interesting plan, and I can see its benefits. However I think I'd oppose it should it come up for being implimented. The reason being, it would be setting aside yet another thing as a personal/non-encyclopedia related user flourish (the "casual" sig). I personally don't have a problem with such things, but I know they tend to cause a lot of controversy (like with userboxes). As sigs are now, they are customized and personal, but also used for valid wikipedia purposes. If there were a separate casual sig, I bet it wouldn't be long before there were calls to get rid of them entirely. -Goldom ‽‽‽ ⁂ 08:02, 3 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Goldom, That is a very valid point and I listed your reason for opposing under the criticisms section. However I do not believe this will happen (which I hope I can make evident through describing my motivation behind creating this proposal.
 * As is evident in the battles over signatures, there are a large number of valuable contributors present on both sides of the issue (personalized and uniform). I feel that there has been alot of heated conflict between the two groups and as a result many are spending their time debating this (rather minor) issue instead of helping to build the best encyclopedia in the world. I believe that this proposal will unify both sides and help everyone get back to building an encyclopedia by satisfying the main desire of each.
 * For the side who favor a uniformed signature, the principle argument (to the best of my understanding) is the fact that that having uniform signatures will help contributors navigate while in edit mode (espically on pages with high volumes of signatures), and a uniformed signature will give a professional look to the project. As a result, in this proposal I require that professional signatures be used in pages that the project as a whole would gain the most (Notably, the Wikipedia and perhaps even the Wikipedia Talk namespace)
 * For the side who favor the ability to have a customized signature, the principle argument (to the best of my understanding) is that Wikipedians who choose to customize their signature often have pride in their appearance while discussing things with their coworkers. Giving wikipedians this freedom is a small sacrifice to allow users a feeling of recgnition (this isn't the word I'm looking for, but it's close) for their hard work. As a result, in this proposal, on all other pages which a signature would be appropriate I give the choice to have either signature (Defaulting 4 tildes to the customized signature thus maintaining functional passivity)
 * Finally, (and the reason I believe this is will not be a slippery slope), I hope and believe (perhaps idealistically) that people on both sides of the issue would recognize that there are valuble contributors with very valid concerns and points on the other side of the argument. And furthermore that everyone would recognize that this is a rather minor argument and is not worth alienating valuable wikipedians from the project simply to require that the project be completely one way or another.
 * I'd like to thank you for your feedback on my first proposal. I hope this insight into my psyche has proven to be helpful and I look forward to hearing any more feedback you may have. Many Regards Charli e ( t 05:50, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Well, it's an interesting idea, I'll say that. As far as compromises go, it's pretty fair. One problem I have with people's sigs being "toned-down" by other editors is that there are a lot of users who have a username that looks much different than their sig (whether from colors or being a different name). If just some of their signs are changed, people may not realize when reading a discussion that it was actually someone they knew that was talking. Your proposal would solve this problem (at least after everyone got used to it). I like your optimism that people would realize both sides have valid concerns, though it seems be it in politics or userbox wars these days, no one will admit they could possibly not be 100% right. Even so, I do agree both sides have a good point, and fighting is causing way, way more disruption than either messy sigs or userboxes ever were. -Goldom (t) (Review) 06:02, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

This is actually a good point, though the way I understand the project page, the so-called formal signature would still be customizable (though not, I hope, with features like sub- and super-scripts). I don't get why people insist on using names that are different from their username anyway. Why not just register using yuor chosen name to begin with? Exploding Boy 06:13, 6 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Although, come to think of it, this would really just make signatures appear the way they do on the watchlist.  Exploding Boy 06:18, 6 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Hello again. Let me apologize in advance if this doesn't read as being as clear my other posts here, my brain is a little fried after work today, but let me see if I can add some clarity to my intentions and reasonings. Drop me a note if I missed something completely or need to have another go at explaining something.
 * From the start it has my intention that these formal signatures would not be customizable at all by the general users, but instead would be agreed upon and set into code (hardcoded, system message, whichever). If we were to introduce choice I would think that it should only go as far as perhaps giving them a choice of a predefined set of certain "signature templetes" to use, but any more than that I fear we may wind up back in the same situation. Maybe they wouldn't be abusing sub and font tags, but instead maybe they're using excessive amounts of unnecessary UTF-8 encoding or excessive internal linking, or worse yet, someone smarter than I comes up with a way to encode around the restrictions we place. I think it would be much more beneficial in the long run (and perhaps easier code wise too) to put larger restrictions on a formal signature, but absolutely require and force its use in fewer namespaces. (And yes, making them appear the way they do on the watchlist is an option. Is that on proposed templates yet? If not I'll add it in a few minutes)
 * As a side note, as far as it goes with registering slightly different user names, in my personal experience I would have liked simply the username Charlie, but someone else (who seems to not have very many edits recently), beat me to it, so I added my last name. I've also seen people use initials, and numbers to get the username they wanted as well. And I think that that just scratches the surface of possible reasons.
 * Regards, Charli e ( t 01:46, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Social engineering question and blue-sky alternative
I find it hard to get worked up about signatures, although I dislike gaudy ones. My question would be who would use 6 or 7-tilde versions? If people like to present elaborate signatures, and as a rule do on talk pages, surely they would be disinclined to use a plainer version, and many editors would even have trouble remembering the code for it. (Beginners may well use the signature button.)

As an alternative thought, more general and powerful solutions would be more worth implementing in the software. I guess ~ is not technically a template, but a token. What if such a the signature merely expanded to something like which takes up less space in the edit box than even a simple sig at present.

The 'sig' (or whatever) template would contain code that ordinarily reads in the text from the user's preferences (the user that is passed as a parameter), but under other conditions would present a simple link to the user's page (the default sig). There could be a per-page condition to satisfy the requirement for staid and formal pages that the proposal currently seems to be aiming at; and perhaps also per-viewing-user preference for people who don't like to see complicated sigs, or a possible modification to monobook.css to suppress the extra text. Just some thoughts. --Cedderstk 09:19, 3 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Cedders, Let me see if I can address all of your concerns.
 * Not using new sigs: This is actually the reason I included Caveat #1 under the proposed technical implementation. The idea would be that in certain namespaces we do not want to allow the use of custom signatures so the software would be coded in such a fashion that if a namespace were on a particular list of required formal sig namespaces, then (as proposed) entering 4 tildes and entering 6 tildes would be identical. (as would 3 and 7) and in such a fashion beginners can still use the sig button. In the spaces where either version goes, 4 tildes will still translate to the customized signature where as 6 would translate to the formal signature, giving the end user a choice. (It's listed as a Caveat currently because I am not sure quite yet as how to implement this)
 * Map to template: I think this was proposed by someone else already. (I modified it so it would include a page in the MediaWiki namespace so it would be a system message instead of assumed content). I'm also not sure if you realize this point or not, but if a template were to be used, signatures would need to be subst'ed. The reason for storing evaluated text instead of a template link is because when a page is requested, each template link must be re-evaluated before the page can be displayed causing undue server load (espically when you think about the sheer number of signatures that appear on Wikipedia every day). With this in mind, I don't think that it would be possible to create such a preference without adding lots of extra code to each signature (and cluttering up the edit mode box which was one of the reasons this proposal came to be).
 * I hope my comments have been of some help. Thank you for your input and I am always happy for more! Regards Charli e ( t 05:02, 4 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply, and sorry I missed the implication of caveat 1. I would suggest a per-namespace override flag wouldn't necessarily give enough granularity for Wikipedia, although it might in corporate MediaWiki projects - mostly we're talking about the Talk namespace in Wikipedia, which is large and has varied requirements.  Yes, I am sure that CPU load would be a current argument against using templates to sign, but I disagree about how it would appear within the edit box.  It would remain the short template form, but the HTML it is rendered as would vary according to the flags (and also, incidentally, if someone changed the sig in their preferences).  --Cedderstk 17:05, 5 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Cedders, I think we may have had a little bit of a misunderstanding as far as it comes to template driven signatures. While I agree that a uniformly assigned dynamic templated signature would be the best as far as edit box landscape goes, there is simply too many people on wikipedia for it to be possible to accomplish without being a burden on the servers. (Every time someone changes their signature, every page that their signature appears on would have to be recached). I do also like the idea of being able to only show one or the other signature to a particular user based on a preference (using CSS and divs) but unfortunately without the ability to template such, every signature would be expanded to 2 signatures, + divs and appropriate classes and would be even worse of a mess than it is currently in edit space.
 * For a quick reference I'm including a list of the namespaces currently available to Wikipedia. I recently realized that the WikiProjects are currently in the Wikipedia namespace and those strike me as being more communal and as a result should be allowed to have custom signatures... So what if we did this: We create WikiProject namespaces at numbers 102 and 103, and we migrate the wikiprojects (+ the sandboxes) from the Wikipedia namespace to these new namespaces. Then it's simply matter of assigning the namespaces to No Signatures, Formal Only, or Custom Available. Numerically I would propose the split below (by NS numbers). While namespaces are fairly granular as you pointed out, to implement on a per page basis would require at least one new column on the database, plus database hits simply to parse your input. (Like dynamic transclusion, this would simply require too many system resources to be feasible for a project as large as wikipedia) However splitting by namespace can be accomplished completely within PHP space and adding only minimal overhead.

Regards Charli e ( t 02:35, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Hmm
While I think there are some creative ideas here, I don't think it will work. Here are some of the problems I can see:


 * 1) Flagging certain pages so that only "formal" signatures are allowed will inevitably create confusion and probably a string of double and triple edits, with users trying to figure out what is "wrong" with their signatures.
 * 2) Creating a situation where different signatures are allowed on different types of pages will in any case be confusing.  We tend to recognize people by their sigs.
 * 3) Implementing this system will still mean that users are inconvenienced on some pages by long and/or extravagant signatures
 * 4) Users may enjoy customizing their signatures, but user and user talk pages offer far more opportunity for creativity and expression.
 * 5) In any case, creativity and expression are not what we're here for; this is supposed to be an academic environment (witness the debacle re: user boxes).

Exploding Boy 15:24, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Exploding Boy, Let me have a go and see if I can satisfactiorily respond to your criticisms. I'd like to first address your points # 3-5.


 * Personally, I feel both sides of the argument have their good points as well as their bad points and as a result do not wish to debate which side is correct here. Instead I want to help bring both sides together to reach a compromise, so that we can move forward with writing an encyclopedia.


 * In any case it is of my humble opinion that there are too many good wikipedians on both sides of the argument to justify having the project be 100% uniform/plain signatures or be 100% customizable (proof is simply in the sheer amount of debate and controversy this issue has sparked). Attempting to force the entire project one way or another causes people to engage in the heated debates that we have seen, or even worse could drive people away from the project, and ultimately hurts the project as a whole by taking valuable manhours away from contributing to the encyclopedia. In light of this, I feel that by forcing the uniform signatures in the places they will be of the most benefit, and by allowing the customized signatures in the more community-oriented sections of the project we can achieve a balanced compromise and get back to writing an encyclopedia.


 * With respect to your first two points, having been in software development for quite some time, I realize that with any significant functional software change there will be an adjustment period for the end users as part of a normal lifecycle process. I believe that there is enough of us to monitor all of the converted pages, and help end users by pointing them to this policy in finished form, a few edits to update existing policies and intro texts, and perhaps a kind note to those users explaining what is occuring on those particular pages and why it is occuring will help bring all wikipedians up to speed.


 * I look forward to hearing your response and further input on this matter. Many regards, Charli e ( t 07:52, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Hurried response: since this is by nature a large and unstable project, or, more specifically, since we have a large and unstable pool of contributors (in that we have so many new users all the time, and so many casual users), and given the problems we already have just with getting new users to sign using four tildes, I remain somewhat unconvinced that implementing this type of system will ever reach a smooth stage.

One more thought: if we can justify forcibly altering signatures on some pages because they are distracting/obtrusive (this is a bit like cell-signal blocking, heh), then how can we justify allowing those same signatures on other pages? Exploding Boy 02:47, 6 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Here's my quick reply: With respect to your point of instability. I feel your argument isn't pointed at this proposal specifically but rather to signatures as a whole. While getting new users adjusted to processes is a continual but necessary battle, I do not believe it would be too difficult to include a brief explanation (in WP:SIG and other tutorial/help pages) that using 4 tildes on project administration pages will render in a uniform way whereas 4 tildes on other pages will render in a customizable way. In either case, new users only have to know to use 4 tildes when they need to sign a comment or vote.
 * With respect to your second thought, I feel we can justify requiring a different personal appearance in different sections just like in the business world you would be required to dress differently when attending and presenting a meeting of the board, versus your everyday work in your cubicles with your team because that is in effect the division here. The sections of wikipedia that are more geared towards the project administration will require a professional feel whereas the less administrativ-y pages and will allow more personal expressiveness (but still falling within guidelines, albiet not as strict guidelines). Many Regards Charli e ( t 03:43, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Any chance of giving users the ability to restrict signatures on their own user talk pages to formal sigs only? Exploding Boy 05:31, 6 June 2006 (UTC)


 * This is partly why I decided to have the formal signature be able to always be available through using 6 tildes instead of 4. In this manner you can request for people to use the formal sig only on your personal talk page, and it allows for them to easily comply. Also as your talk page is the conduit for all communication with you, I feel you should be free to refactor any signature down to the formal or to even to simply a username + link to their user page. I don't think we could efficiently implement this any better in software while keeping minimum overhead. Regards Charli e ( t 05:53, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Just to get back to your last comment a few posts up, I think it's a small step to argue that if "formal" (plain, unadorned, basic) signatures are required/enforced on some pages, they should be required on all pages. Wouldn't it be easier, and ultimately more effective, to limit fancy signatures only to user talk pages? Exploding Boy 06:17, 6 June 2006 (UTC)


 * While it may be more efficient, I don't think that requiring "formal" signatures on all pages would be a good move and I would like to make my (rather idealistic and rambling case) as follows: The reason Wikipedia is such a sucessful project is that wikipedia is supported by a gihugeic number of enthusiastic volunteers (Wikipedians) willing to donate their free time and hard efforts in the hope that Wikipedia can become the best source of free and accurate information available. As a byproduct of this much creative energy being poured into such a confined area of the internet, I would argue that Wikipedians have even formed their own sub-culture or WikiCulture. Signatures, BJADON, user pages, WikiLove, Esperanza, and even to a degree userboxes... all of these things are completely not encyclopedic, they don't put extreme strain on the encyclopedia being available, but they do serve very encyclopedic purpose by helping build to a warm, friendly, welcoming, dedicated, creatively minded, and thankful WikiCulture. Having this kind of society surrounding Wikipedia is a very good thing as with it we hope to attract more users, and by completely removing custom signatures from all pages I would fear we would be losing a part of that culture. Now, please don't get me wrong, I am not advocating for custom signatures on all pages either. To illustrate this point a motto a company I have worked for is "Work hard, play hard." The idea in a very small nutshell is that there is a place for business, and a place for fun, but both have to exist for the company (in this case Wikipedia) to progress.
 * I hope this helps you better understand my position of why it would be good to limit signatures in some places but not everywhere. If you have more counter arguments, please do raise them (or as I said before, if I'm not being exactly clear today too). Many Regards Charli e ( t 02:27, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Dammit! Why do you have to be so damn reasonable!

It sounds to me as though you're saying that since people are here donating their time that we should throw them a bone by letting them customize their signatures. Sort of like casual Fridays. Sounds reasonable, right? The problem is that it seems to be all or nothing. Thus we have users with signatures that are 6 or more lines in the edit window, signatures with various colours and embellishments, signatures that contain hidden links.... It's all just so much clutter. Your comment about userboxes is an important one: userboxes have become the subject of a vicious debate, and have caused umpteen problems on Wikipedia. So much energy wasted on something so trivial, and something that has so little to do with what we're supposed to be doing here. Exploding Boy 05:48, 7 June 2006 (UTC)


 * He he... I got a good chuckle out of your first comment, it helped lighten my mood after a long day of trying to get Eclipse to do what I need it to do. :-)
 * I'll have to be honest, but I do not understand your view of this being an all or nothing affair. But hopefully I can explain my view a bit further and request for you to do the same, and we can figure it all out. Anywho... Like a business, there would be places where formal signatures would be required (and enforced by software), and there would be other places where these restrictions do not exist. I do like your "Casual Friday" analogy for relating to this, because like "Casual Friday" the company rewards you by giving you a bit more freedom to wear what you want. However even on "Casual Friday", if you're going to be meeting with clients, you'll still have to be in a suit, furthermore if you show up in something completely inappropriate (Speedo, Birthday suit... etc.) you're still liable to get fired.
 * On Wikipedia here, if this proposal were to take effect, instead of Casual Friday, we'll have Casual & Formal namespaces. Your suit (formal sig) would be required in some namespaces, whereas in other namespaces you would be free to be casual within reason. The most disruptive sigs like the outrageous one posted as an example on the recent RfC talk, sigs that violate policies such as WP:NPA WP:CIVIL WP:NLT, sigs that cause excessive load on the servers through not substituting templates or include many (more than 2) 10-20px images, sigs that break layouts at 1024x768 and 96DPI, sigs that deliberately try to impersonate other people, sigs that destroy the formatting of the page beyond it, and perhaps other reasons that I failed to mention would still be liable to being refactored on sight even in casual space with a very strong suggestion to change and reasons to change (aside from blocking initially) left on the users talk page.
 * I feel however that in these casual spaces, as users would be allowed, and perhaps in some places even encouraged to be a bit more creative, the de-facto rule on how much WikiMarkup it would require shouldn't apply as much. (If we're approaching 2K in markup alone per sig however, I would support refactoring & engaging in discussing with the user to as that would then start bordering on server strain issues)
 * Also, as I mentioned before though, Signatures on user talk pages would be left to the discression of that particular user, and it would be up to the other wikipedians leaving messages there to respect that user's wishes.
 * Finally, with respect to the userboxes. As I had stated that to a degree Userboxes were part of WikiCulture, I would like to expand on this point a little by explaining that while it is very unfortunate the amount of debate userboxes have sparked (It's almost like the signature debates is like a mini userbox debate), Userboxes are something that could be considered uniquely Wikipedian (at least I've never seen anything like them anywhere else). Furthermore (rather ideallistically and theoretically), Userboxes can be used to help bring people together for support (see my comment on the RfCat Del on the Mental Health categories), and also a quick uniform & visual way of getting a general feel for where a particular user's personal POV may lie. Unfortunately, reality isn't as nice as this, and there are many issues with userboxes, as a result we have the now infamous userbox debates and I think the community has alot to work through before those particular debates are solved. (I'm thinking once I have the time to read alot more of the debates, and depending on the outcome of this proposal, I may try my hand at presenting a fair compromise there so people can move on in that arena as well.
 * As an aside, I would like to see if we could get more feedback on this proposal, do you have suggestions as to where we could post a comment and a link asking for review and commentary of this proposal? Thanks in advance, and many regards Charli e ( t 02:47, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

No, no, no, no, no
This perennial proposal is still a bad idea.

Sigs should include a link to one's user page and perhaps one's talk page; sigs should display one's username. All else is foolishness and often deceptive as well. Bright colors, cute formatting, obscure symbols, flashy images, POTD links, and sigs that display an alias are all great annoyances to the serious editor. At the very least, they make it hard to dig through wikimarkup.

But I do not support any rules banning fancy sigs! Such rules are worse than the problems they would address. Fancy sigs perform an outstanding function -- for me at any rate: they show me at a glance that users are not to be taken seriously. I don't have to go digging through contribs or refer to talk; I don't have to ask anybody, "Say, what do you think of User Foo?" As soon as I see the silly, overblown, self-centered markup I know right away that whatever else this person may be doing, he or she has one hand firmly on his or her genitals. And I don't need to give any particular weight to what he or she says.

Wikipedians are a large and diverse group. I don't know everyone personally and it would be a full time job to try to judge the merit of every editor on the project. Editors foolish enough to advertise their foolishness and self-centeredness do me a great service. Why stand in their way?

The only restriction I would support would be that a sig must link to one's user page. I'm not aware that any user currently has a sig that does not do so but I think the potential for confusion is obvious. (Indeed, it would not be easy to search for violators; the restriction should be enforced by the MediaWiki engine.) Users with special symbols in their sigs should be aware that I will make no effort whatever to preserve them while editing or refactoring pages; if they get munged by my editing routine, so be it.

Beyond this, no rules. As with so many forms of personal expression, any possible annoyance is well paid for by advertising the nature of fools. John Reid 17:22, 10 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Heh. I can't disagree with much of this (although I am in favour of banning fancy signatures).  Exploding Boy 17:26, 10 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi John, While I do agree that sigs do give first impressions on how a user should be viewed, I was hoping that with this proposal we would gain the benefits of having only clean sigs on the pages that have a high signatures to comment ratio (I think votes at the very least) while allowing those who choose to have fancy signatures to keep them on other pages. With cleaner (wikitext) vote pages enforced on a software level closing votes, adding votes/comments, will become easier for everyone, and we won't waste time and resources on fights over signatures being refactored anymore. Furthermore, you'll still be able to see their customized signatures on other pages that you come across that particular editor commenting on as well.
 * Perhaps a weak and rather overly-idealistic argument, but *shrugs*. You do mention that this is a perennial proposal, would you be willing to provide links so that I could read over the old proposals/discussion better refine my ideas? Thanks a bunch. Regards Charli e ( t 06:26, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Sorry, Charlie; this comes up on the Pump about once a month but we don't archive the Pump permanently and I'm not really up to digging through the Wayback Machine. Hey, I've had the thought myself; some sigs just drive me up the wall.

If any solution is to require engine modification then let's make it a good one. Screw customizable sigs altogether. They were a bad idea from day one. The first generation of editors didn't abuse them as creatively as newbies do. Some of the latest sigs are so overblown they make my eyes hurt. Dump 'em. Let the engine insert standard text in place of tildes: something along the lines of user, but a bit more compact. Admins should get sigs like admin; and so forth.

My argument still holds; it's excellent to allow users to express their personality directly and at the same time and place that they express their other opinions. A person's opinion of himself is important to me; a surprisingly high percentage of fools are eager to show themselves as such.

Let's introduce user-editable avatars. That is, each user has the opportunity to create and edit a page with the title User:Foo/Avatar. The engine will transclude this text into a popup that appears when the user's sig is moused over. My preferences must include an option for turning this feature entirely off, or limiting it to the first N chars of the avatar page, and/or limiting it to an overall screen size of P pixels square. Each user will be free to construct fancy wikimarkup or simply display a headshot. Some users will do both. All of us can see as much of this as we are willing. John Reid 05:01, 14 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Excellent.  Exploding Boy 15:31, 14 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Hey John, Echoing Exploding Boy on this one, I think that would be a very good option. Would you consider writing that proposal up too as an alternative to this one? My initial gut feeling would be to figure out what would be the impact on the server & bandwidth wise would be for that (but I don't think it would be much worse than the popups javascript). Regards --Charli e ( t &#x7c; e ) 03:23, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Explanation of removal of a point by Tony Sidaway
I've removed this:
 * Just because a policy exists does not mean someone will obey that particullar policy. Therefore we could investigate the ability to add a flag that would always substitute with the formal signature on certain namespaces.

Needless to say, all editors are expected to follow Wikipedia policy. There are no exceptions. --Tony Sidaway 01:26, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
 * With that, my point was that while all editors are expected to follow Wikipedia policy, it is a fact that there are some editors that do not. However, instead of taking time from other editors by having to go through and do cleanup, issue expanations, warnings & bans if appropriate it would be easier if the software did some of it for us. --Charli e ( t 05:56, 11 June 2006 (UTC)