[Wikipedia-l] Re: The wiki software is written for wikipedia

Thu Jun 10 08:01:46 UTC 2004

Gerard.Meijssen wrote:
  > LS, When I follow what has happened the last few days, I can not help
  > but come to the conclusion that things are done with wikipedia in
  > mind.

Not exactly. We generally have two things in mind: Wikipedia, and
non-Wikimedia users.

  > Take for instance those lines that are "gratis" when you use
  > headings. They make excellent sense when in Wikipedia but they look
  > _horrible_ in wiktionary. Have a look at
  > http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Breton for instance. It does not look
  > good.

You should be able to override this using [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]]

  > Take a look at the restriction on the number of messages (5) per
  > page. This is "reasonable" in wikipedia, but when you want to
  > internationalise a page and use messages to indicate things that
  > differ from language to language, like the gender of a word, you can
  > have dozens words that are masculine and you get garbage as a result.

I've received a number of complaints about this from Wikipedians, and
this is the first one I've had from someone from Wiktionary, so I fail
to see how this indicates Wikipedia-centrism. It's a problem I intend to
address during my reworking of template inclusion, over the next week or
two.

  > When there are problems, they seem to be relatively quickly fixed for
  > the wikipedia's but, for the wiktionaries the consistency  is
  > lacking.
  >
  > When you have an environment like wiktionary/wikipedia they _need_ to
  > be the same in order to be able to fix things and understand the
  > behaviour of the software. The wiktionaries do not behave in a same
  > way. You can create an article with a Chinese (characters) name in
  > English but not on the nl:wiktionary (and others).

Wiktionaries were set up by copying the MediaWiki namespace and language
files from the associated Wikipedias. You can't create an article with
chinese characters in the title on the nl wikipedia either. English and
German are exceptions to this rule because of special-case work done by
the respective contributors.

  > We have just had a major disaster. What I expected in the aftermath
  > was some consolidation. However, now the "Enhanced recent changes
  > (not for all browsers)" in preferences is up the creek!!

What's wrong with it? It looks fine to me.

  > What concerns me is that for us "simple" users there is no idea what
  > problems are being tacled. What the priorities are and if things
  > still get tested prior to production.
  >
  > *Is the idea that we have stabilized?? *Do we still have database
  > problems? (anecdotal evidence says we do) *Is there a moratorium on
  > minor stuff so that there is the peace and quiet to fix the major
  > stuff?

I'm not going to announce everything I do in 10 different places. If you
want to know what's going on in terms of software development and server
administration, you should read wikitech-l.

Please understand that I'm not obliged to fix problems just because you
want them fixed. You are not paying me. I try to make people happy, but
you have no right to expect a minimum level of service.

I'm amazed at the poor quality of the English Wiktionary, it seems to
miss so many important English words. Most new pages seem to be slang,
jargon, and people adding a few dozen words from their native tongue.
Plans to import a public domain dictionary were abandoned, and now there
seems to be little organisation or direction. Perhaps Wiktionary can be
revitalised with extra features, but I doubt stylesheet changes will be
enough. It needs a different look and a whole raft of features. It needs
methods for easily adding new words, and for categorisation and listing.
But I'm neither excited by the project nor optimistic about its future.
So most of all, it needs people who want to work on it.

-- Tim Starling