On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 2:58 PM, Matthew Brown <morven(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Feb 8, 2009 at 6:45 PM, Skyring
<skyring(a)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