Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 6:45 PM, Skyring skyr...@gmail.com wrote: So. Are we an international project, paying appropriate attention to internationalising our product, or are we a battleground of cultural imperialism? We're a battleground of cultural imperialism, of course … even if we shouldn't be. It does bother me, though, that one of the few, if imperfect, ways we had of presenting information in the way the reader preferred - I refer of course to our date formatting preferences - is being neutered because the implementation was poor, rather than improved. The problems with it were twofold; firstly, that for un-logged-in users, it displayed a mishmash of styles that often ended up the worst possible solution, and secondly that it required wikilinks, which offended people who have an aversion to excess links in articles. I have a strong feeling that it was actually the second reason that was the real driving force behind the delinking; I felt a sense of glee from partisans when they discovered that date preferences only worked for logged-in users and thus most of the readership didn't get pretty dates. It gave them a nice big club to use in debate to get what they wanted, which was prettier articles from their point of view. Better would have been fixing it to work better. Not leaving links in the HTML. Sensible defaults for non-logged-in users; most modern browsers send information on the user's language preference, including UK versus US; how much such preferences are accurately set I'm not sure, but it's there. -Matt ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Matthew Brown mor...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 6:45 PM, Skyring skyr...@gmail.com wrote: So. Are we an international project, paying appropriate attention to internationalising our product, or are we a battleground of cultural imperialism? We're a battleground of cultural imperialism, of course … even if we shouldn't be. It does bother me, though, that one of the few, if imperfect, ways we had of presenting information in the way the reader preferred - I refer of course to our date formatting preferences - is being neutered because the implementation was poor, rather than improved. The problems with it were twofold; firstly, that for un-logged-in users, it displayed a mishmash of styles that often ended up the worst possible solution, and secondly that it required wikilinks, which offended people who have an aversion to excess links in articles. I have a strong feeling that it was actually the second reason that was the real driving force behind the delinking; I felt a sense of glee from partisans when they discovered that date preferences only worked for logged-in users and thus most of the readership didn't get pretty dates. It gave them a nice big club to use in debate to get what they wanted, which was prettier articles from their point of view. To be fair, the date preferences-as-wikilinks situation *had* led to overlinking. I'm fairly liberal in terms of linking and tend to overlink from the view of many people, but even I see that many of the date links were pointless. The trouble is, not all were pointless and people argued over the details while the bots mostly ignored restrictions and stripped date links regardless of objections. Sometimes, in the most ridiculous cases, the bot operator talked to the objectors, the links were restored with promises that the bot would be changed, and then the next bot run removed the links again! That's just inept. Better would have been fixing it to work better. Not leaving links in the HTML. Sensible defaults for non-logged-in users; most modern browsers send information on the user's language preference, including UK versus US; how much such preferences are accurately set I'm not sure, but it's there. Agreed. Trouble is, there was foot-dragging going on and no-one really working on it. Then, when date-delinking started and some people started working (or resuming work) on a technical solution, there was too much momentum and the speed of the bot operations almost certainly discouraged those who had been working on technical solutions. Lots of bad-faith assumptions and foot-dragging and forcing solutions through. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 4:46 PM, Charlotte Webb charlottethew...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 10:11 AM, Magnus Manske magnusman...@googlemail.com wrote: As a technical note, CSS3 promises to have nifty features, such as adding text based on class. It might be that we can then realize indivudualized dates via CSS rather than JavaScript. And how soon do you expect Internet Explorer to support that? For what it's worth, our accessibility watchdogs already ask us not to use certain js/css features that later versions of IE *do* support, on the basis that there are too many IE users who don't use later versions of it. Not for a while (although IE8 might surprise us). However, I expect that anyone who really cares about his his/her date writing on wikipedia would use Firefox anyway :-) Magnus ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 1:07 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.com wrote: To be fair, the date preferences-as-wikilinks situation *had* led to overlinking. I'm fairly liberal in terms of linking and tend to overlink from the view of many people, but even I see that many of the date links were pointless. The trouble is, not all were pointless and people argued over the details while the bots mostly ignored restrictions and stripped date links regardless of objections. Sometimes, in the most ridiculous cases, the bot operator talked to the objectors, the links were restored with promises that the bot would be changed, and then the next bot run removed the links again! That's just inept. Which is why i recommended/suggested a special character for dates, so you can allow autoformatting but not the automatic linking (although i guess you could have a option in your preferences for the people that liked it). Using a special character could have other uses as well i guess like automatic metadata attached to the article or something along those lines. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
On 08/02/2009, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: 2009/2/8 White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com: Hard coded in the context of my message is when dates are typed out. Like January, 20 1956 rather than soft coded [[1956-01-20]]. Ideally all dates should always be soft coded and be modified by users preferences. In reality the exact opposite of this is done. So your hard coded to use American dates is something that can be got around by, er, the editor not writing American dates? I am not seeing this as quite the catastrophe you are, and you could equally present it as the wiki being forced to use non-American date styles... All White Cat is saying is that the wikipedia needs markup(s) to handle dates. And in fact, right now there are multiple markups available, including American-style ones. As for the underlying debate, we have thrashed out the date-linking issue before at great length, and your ideal is certainly not one shared by many other users. I've been seeing this argument a lot on the wikipedia lately. I've never been able to see it as other than a call for straight voting to determine issues rather than consensus; and that seems to be harmful. I've frequently found that even what are initially minority opinions can turn out to be the adopted position that consensus takes, indeed that is probably usually the case, ideas are usually invented by somebody and spread. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be much better. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
Why do you want to force me to see US-style dates? Inches? Fahrenheits? Ounces? On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 3:23 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.ukwrote: 2009/2/8 White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com: Hard coded in the context of my message is when dates are typed out. Like January, 20 1956 rather than soft coded [[1956-01-20]]. Ideally all dates should always be soft coded and be modified by users preferences. In reality the exact opposite of this is done. So your hard coded to use American dates is something that can be got around by, er, the editor not writing American dates? I am not seeing this as quite the catastrophe you are, and you could equally present it as the wiki being forced to use non-American date styles... As for the underlying debate, we have thrashed out the date-linking issue before at great length, and your ideal is certainly not one shared by many other users. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
The logical course of action is letting the reader decide the style. Making it modifiable. When the rule was first drafted we did not even have the ISO conversion technology (aka [[1956-01-20]] style). Now we do. We should take advantage of it. - White Cat On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 4:19 PM, Ian Woollard ian.wooll...@gmail.com wrote: On 08/02/2009, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: 2009/2/8 White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com: Hard coded in the context of my message is when dates are typed out. Like January, 20 1956 rather than soft coded [[1956-01-20]]. Ideally all dates should always be soft coded and be modified by users preferences. In reality the exact opposite of this is done. So your hard coded to use American dates is something that can be got around by, er, the editor not writing American dates? I am not seeing this as quite the catastrophe you are, and you could equally present it as the wiki being forced to use non-American date styles... All White Cat is saying is that the wikipedia needs markup(s) to handle dates. And in fact, right now there are multiple markups available, including American-style ones. As for the underlying debate, we have thrashed out the date-linking issue before at great length, and your ideal is certainly not one shared by many other users. I've been seeing this argument a lot on the wikipedia lately. I've never been able to see it as other than a call for straight voting to determine issues rather than consensus; and that seems to be harmful. I've frequently found that even what are initially minority opinions can turn out to be the adopted position that consensus takes, indeed that is probably usually the case, ideas are usually invented by somebody and spread. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be much better. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
All White Cat is saying is that the wikipedia needs markup(s) to handle dates. And in fact, right now there are multiple markups available, including American-style ones. Thats not mark up, what your describing is style/layout. The markup would be the wikicode surronding it it. For example it would be nice if we had a custom markup for date that didn't link it, that could detect what was contained in it would be nice and used the users perfernece for formatting first then fell back to something else like the browser detection or a decided format (at the moment it would appear to be American Dates). I'm talking about something like DATE and then it would do autoformatting of the date and it would also assist in the metadata contained in the page as well, and also have the ability to force a certain style and define date names as well (eg: 2008-12-25|f=Friday, 25 December 2008|name=Christmas Day (2008)) ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 1:58 AM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: All White Cat is saying is that the wikipedia needs markup(s) to handle dates. And in fact, right now there are multiple markups available, including American-style ones. Thats not mark up, what your describing is style/layout. The markup would be the wikicode surronding it it. For example it would be nice if we had a custom markup for date that didn't link it, that could detect what was contained in it would be nice and used the users perfernece for formatting first then fell back to something else like the browser detection or a decided format (at the moment it would appear to be American Dates). I'm talking about something like DATE and then it would do autoformatting of the date and it would also assist in the metadata contained in the page as well, and also have the ability to force a certain style and define date names as well (eg: 2008-12-25|f=Friday, 25 December 2008|name=Christmas Day (2008)) 2008-12-25|f=Friday, 25 December 2008|name=Christmas Day (2008) That is rather complex. Most editors are not going to want to type that. Carcharoth ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 12:58 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: All White Cat is saying is that the wikipedia needs markup(s) to handle dates. And in fact, right now there are multiple markups available, including American-style ones. Thats not mark up, what your describing is style/layout. The markup would be the wikicode surronding it it. For example it would be nice if we had a custom markup for date that didn't link it, that could detect what was contained in it would be nice and used the users perfernece for formatting first then fell back to something else like the browser detection or a decided format (at the moment it would appear to be American Dates). I'm talking about something like DATE and then it would do autoformatting of the date and it would also assist in the metadata contained in the page as well, and also have the ability to force a certain style and define date names as well (eg: 2008-12-25|f=Friday, 25 December 2008|name=Christmas Day (2008)) It would be nice, maybe, but hardly practical. Many dates are direct quotes, or have been agreed to be in a specific format. A case in point is the article on the September 11, 2001 attacks. How do you separate out the dates that should be kept unchanged from those that swing with the reader? And, as something like 99% of Wikipedia's users do not have registered accounts, doing an IP lookup for most article views is an enormous overhead. Having some techno syntax for forcing date formatting confuses new editors. Why not just let people enter the dates any way they see fit, and some wikiwonk like me will come along and fix them in due course. After all, few people are going to be confused about which date is meant in either of the two text formats we support: 25 December 2008 is the same date as December 25, 2008. What is frustrating is the demands from some chauvinists that American dates be used in non-American articles. France uses International format dates (14 July 1789), but oh, the battles that rage when American dates are tidied up from such articles! You can almost hear the teeth grinding when I do a sweep through British articles and change the dates there. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hazel_Byford,_Baroness_Byforddiff=nextoldid=243822628 -- Peter in Canberra ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 1:32 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@yahoo.com.au wrote: What is frustrating is the demands from some chauvinists that American dates be used in non-American articles. France uses International format dates (14 July 1789), But were not all american so they shouldn't be used, there should be a global accessibable standard. The only real standard for dates is the ISO one: 2008-12-25. Some countries, notably Asian ones where written text is in characters not suited to an English language wiki, use year-month-day. But we aren't going to use that standard, because it looks odd in English text. Sigmund Jones married Mary Smith on 2008-12-25. Their son, Solaris, was born a week later on 2009-01-01. It's easy enough to find out what format a country or a region or a culture uses - just go to the preferences screen for your computer and select the appropriate area to see an example. Surprise, surprise, surprise. Very few countries use the American month-day-year format. So. Are we an international project, paying appropriate attention to internationalising our product, or are we a battleground of cultural imperialism? My preference is to use U.S. formats, measurements, currency for U.S. articles, and take it from there: use the forms appropriate to the subject. If there's no obvious default, then leave it alone, following the BC/BCE wars that spawned the Arbcoms's Jguk decision. -- Peter in Canberra ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
We could start a wikiproject to enforce how people need to get kicked out of the project space. /sarcasm On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 8:12 AM, Brian br...@bhaws.com wrote: For whatever it's worth, Wikipedia has become a complex and byzantine bureaucracy...it's a maze of process and rules and editors that never get tired of enforcing either. It'll never happen but we should start kicking people out of project space. -Original Message- From: wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of White Cat Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 11:16 PM To: English Wikipedia Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit I am a bit weary about the over standardization of the site. There seems to be a one correct version philosophy. I was hoping it to self-destruct but it seems like that aint gonna happen. We are now forced to use US style dates... Thus it is the American Encyclopedia internationals (non USians) should feel uncomfortable in visiting let alone editing. We are now forced to use a certain specific template when an alternate is available... Self righteous people will deprecate the other one without even bothering to discuss... We are now forced to not link to dates on list articles... There are tens of other similar changes. Even more trivial issues are dictated by either a guideline or a wikiproject. Are we a bureaucracy now? In the past we had multiple correct ways. For example the use of ISO dates (aka [[-mm-dd]] dates) were encouraged. Users could alter their settings to display the dates in any way they please. The ISO dates were drafted as a compromise to the international versus US date war. Now US dates are hard coded. You do not get to alter it. The site is becoming increasingly hostile. Oh and yes I know this mailinglist post will most certainly not fix anything. There isn't a better median though. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
Trouble with that is that the vast majority of readers do not have accounts with user preferences to set. They are unregistered readers (some people create accounts purely to be able to set these preferences). What unregistered readers see is a mish-mash of different date formats, sometimes in the same article. Log out occasionally and see what the majority of our readers see. It can be quite a shock to have all the customised skins and user preferences taken away. Ditto for DVD and print versions of articles. Carcharoth On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 1:47 AM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com wrote: Hard coded in the context of my message is when dates are typed out. Like January, 20 1956 rather than soft coded [[1956-01-20]]. Ideally all dates should always be soft coded and be modified by users preferences. In reality the exact opposite of this is done. On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.ukwrote: 2009/2/6 White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com: We are now forced to use US style dates... Thus it is the American Encyclopedia internationals (non USians) should feel uncomfortable in visiting let alone editing. (...) In the past we had multiple correct ways. For example the use of ISO dates (aka [[-mm-dd]] dates) were encouraged. Users could alter their settings to display the dates in any way they please. The ISO dates were drafted as a compromise to the international versus US date war. Now US dates are hard coded. You do not get to alter it. hard coded? This is news to me and news to the Manual of Style. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSNUM#Full_date_formatting Perhaps you could provide some evidence to back up this assertion? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
I know all that. But thats really a minor software issue. We could for example allow IP's to set such preferences. Or display a default dating format based on the IP. If the IP is from the US, display the US dating format, else display international standard. It could be as simple as putting a link on every page (for IPs) asking the user to click if he or she wants to see the data in imperial or metric style. The point is we should promote the ability to customize how people can see data in a way they are comfortable with. There is absolutely no reason to force me to learn an archaic and useless format such as inches, fahrenheits, ounces and etc. For similar reasons no reason to force a fahrenheit person to learn celsius. The conversion rate of celsius to fahrenheit is well known. Software can compute this effortlessly. Even if the reader has an account he or she cannot set a fixed metric for stuff like date, temperature, length, weight and etc. The complaint against standardization mentioned here is against the forced non-customizable formats. This complaint wants to see all dates (and other metrcis) to be inputed in a machine readable way. On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 3:58 AM, Carcharoth carcharot...@googlemail.comwrote: Trouble with that is that the vast majority of readers do not have accounts with user preferences to set. They are unregistered readers (some people create accounts purely to be able to set these preferences). What unregistered readers see is a mish-mash of different date formats, sometimes in the same article. Log out occasionally and see what the majority of our readers see. It can be quite a shock to have all the customised skins and user preferences taken away. Ditto for DVD and print versions of articles. Carcharoth On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 1:47 AM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com wrote: Hard coded in the context of my message is when dates are typed out. Like January, 20 1956 rather than soft coded [[1956-01-20]]. Ideally all dates should always be soft coded and be modified by users preferences. In reality the exact opposite of this is done. On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 1:37 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: 2009/2/6 White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com: We are now forced to use US style dates... Thus it is the American Encyclopedia internationals (non USians) should feel uncomfortable in visiting let alone editing. (...) In the past we had multiple correct ways. For example the use of ISO dates (aka [[-mm-dd]] dates) were encouraged. Users could alter their settings to display the dates in any way they please. The ISO dates were drafted as a compromise to the international versus US date war. Now US dates are hard coded. You do not get to alter it. hard coded? This is news to me and news to the Manual of Style. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSNUM#Full_date_formatting Perhaps you could provide some evidence to back up this assertion? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 12:17 PM, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com wrote: I know all that. But thats really a minor software issue. We could for example allow IP's to set such preferences. Or display a default dating format based on the IP. If the IP is from the US, display the US dating format, else display international standard. I thought we already supported browser detection so its decides off the data that the web browser (eg: region) holds. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
On 08/02/2009, White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com wrote: I know all that. But thats really a minor software issue. We could for example allow IP's to set such preferences. Or display a default dating format based on the IP. If the IP is from the US, display the US dating format, else display international standard. I think there would tend to be problems with caching. Some ISPs/caches probably straddle national boundaries, and that would tend to mean that where two users either side of the boundary viewing the same pages one would tend to get the wrong format, because the URL would be the same. The normal way that is dealt with on the web is with the ? symbol in the URL which bypasses the cache (together with a cookie), but that's probably a bad idea for the wikipedia, it would increase the traffic quite a bit. Another way would be to encode the standards to be used in the URL in some way, but there's disadvantages for that as well. The javascript idea where the page dynamically calculates it in the browser may have more legs though, at least for dates, and possibly other viewing preferences also. -- -Ian Woollard We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. Life in a perfectly imperfect world would be much better. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
2009/2/6 White Cat wikipedia.kawaii.n...@gmail.com: We are now forced to use US style dates... Thus it is the American Encyclopedia internationals (non USians) should feel uncomfortable in visiting let alone editing. (...) In the past we had multiple correct ways. For example the use of ISO dates (aka [[-mm-dd]] dates) were encouraged. Users could alter their settings to display the dates in any way they please. The ISO dates were drafted as a compromise to the international versus US date war. Now US dates are hard coded. You do not get to alter it. hard coded? This is news to me and news to the Manual of Style. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSNUM#Full_date_formatting Perhaps you could provide some evidence to back up this assertion? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
hard coded? This is news to me and news to the Manual of Style. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSNUM#Full_date_formatting Perhaps you could provide some evidence to back up this assertion? Almost all templates these days are designed to have dates entered in a certain way and for a hint its not the ISO8601 method. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
Re: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit
For whatever it's worth, Wikipedia has become a complex and byzantine bureaucracy...it's a maze of process and rules and editors that never get tired of enforcing either. It'll never happen but we should start kicking people out of project space. -Original Message- From: wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-boun...@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of White Cat Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2009 11:16 PM To: English Wikipedia Subject: [WikiEN-l] Wikipedia, the overly standarised Encyclopedia you wouldn't dare edit I am a bit weary about the over standardization of the site. There seems to be a one correct version philosophy. I was hoping it to self-destruct but it seems like that aint gonna happen. We are now forced to use US style dates... Thus it is the American Encyclopedia internationals (non USians) should feel uncomfortable in visiting let alone editing. We are now forced to use a certain specific template when an alternate is available... Self righteous people will deprecate the other one without even bothering to discuss... We are now forced to not link to dates on list articles... There are tens of other similar changes. Even more trivial issues are dictated by either a guideline or a wikiproject. Are we a bureaucracy now? In the past we had multiple correct ways. For example the use of ISO dates (aka [[-mm-dd]] dates) were encouraged. Users could alter their settings to display the dates in any way they please. The ISO dates were drafted as a compromise to the international versus US date war. Now US dates are hard coded. You do not get to alter it. The site is becoming increasingly hostile. Oh and yes I know this mailinglist post will most certainly not fix anything. There isn't a better median though. ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l ___ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
