Saturday 24 January 2009

Steps to improve wikipedia

I have just been repeatedly insulted by a user on wikipedia with such terms as "you really are just talking gibberish now", "Your accusations of original research are pathetic", "I cannot believe I wasted my time on these arguments believing you to at least be rational", "you're a complete hypocrite", or "I am sorry you don't possess the intelligence...".

Well it's the first time it happens for me, and I'm really editing in wikipedia for some years now, so it's not such big deal (I'm sure it can / will happen to everyone after a while), but it made me think about things that could improve editing in this project. This will not change anything in cases like mine now (sadly there's people like that everywhere), but I'm trying to look more generally than just around my little problem):

  • make it mandatory to register, so as it would really be possible to block vandals (again this is NOT related to my case, as the user insulted me, but he clearly is NOT a vandal). I remember a case when various IP addressed obviously coming from the same origin kept vandalizing various articles, but the address changed because it must have been an internet cafe or a school, so it was really impossible to block it, even using IP)

  • allow to see the IP for any registered accounts (except in special cases of course, related to people wanting to be protected when posting, such as in some countries when posting on internet can be dangerous from their well-being). This would then be easier to detect people payed to post for various companies

Sunday 4 January 2009

XUL for Java: stucked (for the moment)

Remember This post: I just created a new java.net project to allow to use XUL declarative scripts out of the box with Java, and allow to bind them at will with Java code or even other scripting languages as well. The code comes from another project were it was working very well, but after extracting it from this project, I still have a big big problem with accessing some Javascript code from the XUL script (which makes the whole thing unusable of course for the moment). I know it's a trivial problem because the same use case works like a charm in the original implementation, I must have deleted the wrong line of code somewhere...