User:Alien333/Thoughts

Thoughts

Some random and debatable thoughts of mine^[1], if you've got time to lose^[2].

• Here, the ultimate goal of technological optimization is to proofread without reading. Most of the human input is unnecessary^[3], and we can go much faster without it.^[4].
• We should not focus on notability or usefulness, as they are both very relative^[6]. I personally choose the works I do because why not^[7].
• Every revert should be explained. And, in general, every correction should be explained. If you don't tell new users how they made a mistake, they're likely to repeat it.
• For technical stuff, the cache is the god and the devil. It is the cause^[8] or the solution^[9] of most problems.
• We have a problem with documentation. No one actively takes care of the help pages^[10]. The /doc subpages of templates are in some cases good, but they're hard to find. We have a great lot of them, a nice help page that doesn't cover a lot of them and a category tree that doesn't either^[11]. Some templates are in categories that make them hard to find^[12]. I am neither the first, nor the second, and not the third either to think we have a documentation issue. There have apparently been a number of attempts to fix this already, and they've more or less all dwindled to nothing.
• Everyone makes mistakes. Not saying it's inevitable; merely that we should at all times expect that we're maybe going to make one, and prevent it.

Notes

1. with an absurd quantity of footnotes for not really necessary information. I am usually more of a parentheses user, but refs clutter the text less, even though it's a bit awkward
2. and you probably do, if you landed here
3. e.g. copying in the previous/next fields names already written in the TOC
4. it is a bit ridiculous that I am taking time that I could have spent proofreading to write on how precious time is
5. though obscure doesn't mean bad, and the best I did were quite obscure
6. notability also has the issue that it's when we duplicate most the work of others, as for instance PG has most famous texts, but likelily not obscure collections of poetry^[5] by authors of whom the work is the only trace
7. and maybe an unreasonable liking of running gags. Can't tell me the 147 authors were notable, or that a lot of people care for them
8. Notably for: scripting, scripts, you're looking for bugs that don't exist anymore; anything which relies on search-based page generators, with a wide range of consequences; images
9. less often than it is the cause, sadly; but often useful for optimisation
10. and despite my complaining about it most of the time I don't either
11. and is sometimes a bit unclear in the distinction between subcategories
12. e.g. {{ppoem}} in Category:Experimental templates