User:Pengo/rants

Pengo's guidelines, and technical problems, and rants about Wikipedia and Wikimedia.

Super-packed linking

I cringe when I see super-packed linking. For example:

• Ancient Greek comedy

instead of the elegant and simple:

• Ancient Greek comedy

Images on userpages

• Images on userpages should not be required to be licensed under a free-content license, if the copyright is held by the uploader/user. 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.

Licensing

The GFDL has problems, and Wikipedia should have started making all new contributions dual licensed with a Creative Commons license long ago.

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: Wikipedia: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

Wikimedia 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 not acceptable.
• 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.

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 pointed to Image:Pengo (game).gif, instead of Pengo.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—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

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.

I have no problem with the current voting systems for things like Featured articles/images.

I won't mention sock puppets.

Userspace

There are few benefits to be gained by applying the NPOV rule to the user name space.

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 wikimedia programmers. The use of templates should be taught and encouraged.

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. to other languages) 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: [[Image:P1070042.JPG]] is fine for inlining an image, but [[Image:P1070042.JPG|Fish]] should only display the text "Fish" (linking to the image). This would be consistant with normal linking syntax. Likewise [[Image:P1070042.JPG|]] 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.

Finding templates

Finding the right template is notoriously difficult. I have no proposed 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 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.

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.

• {{Thumbnail_size}} e.g. should give 150
• {{Descpage_size|image.jpg}} 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.

Grammar

• Clarity over consistancy: 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.

</rant>