29 Nov 2013, 23:33
The whole notion of whether articles go in Category or Main was awfully confusing and just looked like people were randomly dumping stuff wherever they felt like it. With that sort of disorder, anyone seeking to add new pages isn't going to have any idea how anything is supposed to be organised. Who do you copy? Who do you believe? You have to pick one way, one strategy, one schema, and stick with it decisively.
Besides, the category-article approach is faked by creating Main namespace redirects (when you have to screw around working around seemingly terrible inter-page link syntax, it should become apparent that you're doing something wrong), but that doesn't for example help anyone who performs a search under the Main namespace. Try a search for "Keyboards sorted by brand/company name" — nothing. That text is under the Category namespace and therefore excluded by default, and it never even occurs to me to search the Category namespace when I'm looking to see if something is defined on a page yet, because, who'd write articles in the wrong namespace?
The disorder was quite deep rooted. We had three different switch infobox templates and two for keyboards (or the other way around) and it took me ages to realise why fields were frequently not showing up — I was copying and pasting infobox blocks without realising that I was bouncing between templates. I spent hours completely reconstructing a single template for each (keyboards and switches) and painstakingly altering every single page to use the single template. Now when I add new template fields, they're guaranteed to work.
Heading names weren't consistent. Gallery image size wasn't consistent, or presence, or lack thereof (some pages just had so many massive images you could barely see the text for them), and some pages even had sub-pages for the images, for no reason other than a complete refusal to be remotely consistent with any existing pages. The whole wiki looked like people had just thrown stuff at it and scarpered. So many pages were full of random formatting, terrible spelling mistakes and typos. It's like how Word 6 had stylesheets in the early 90s, and still nobody knows what they do and how they help with consistent formatting within a document and between documents — just random all the way.
Most images have retarded names (just heaps of random digits usually) and no descriptions, so if I'm looking for an image, I won't find it. Even when I do, it's probably stolen. There's nothing recorded under it that gives any indication what it is or where it came from.
At this stage, I have no patience for anyone screwing this up. I've spent a lot of time sorting this out, and there's so much more to go — I'm still finding keyboard pages with completely random and haphazard layouts that I didn't even know existed, and restructuring them. It's a hell of a lot cleaner and tidier and more organised than it was a year ago, with much better page-to-page consistency, but I'd have a lot more useful work done if I wasn't forever cleaning up after everyone else's mess and disordered minds.
After all, we now have Japan and Korea and other countries looking to it, as well as Geekhack (who appear to have given up on their wiki and just use ours) and it was genuinely shameful to have such an amateurish and unpresentable site. As time passes, we're getting closer to quality presentation.
Sadly, the ideals cannot be achieved with MediaWiki — it's the wrong software for what we're trying to do. I have no expectations that we'll ever break free of it, however.
