User:Jorge Stolfi

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I am a professor of computer science at the State University of Campinas, Brazil. Most of my work outside Wikipedia is related to computer graphics, computational geometry, image processing and numerical computing. I have also worked in computational linguistics and graph theory, and I have spent a lot of time analyzing the Voynich Manuscript.

I am the author of all edits by 143.106.24.42 and 143.106.24.25. I have also edited occasionally through 201.82.133.122, a shared IP (since aug.2009).

Specs

pt	Este usuário/utilizador tem como língua nativa o português.

vec	Sto utente el parla vèneto come só łengoa mare.

en-3	This user is able to contribute with an advanced level of English.

es-2	Este usuario puede contribuir con un nivel intermedio de español.

it-2	Questo utente può contribuire con un livello intermedio di italiano.

fr-1	Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau élémentaire de français.

This user contributes using Linux.

	This editor is a Veteran Editor II and is entitled to display this Bronze Editor Star.

[edit] Missing templates

There are many templates that I sorely miss in Wikipedia. Here is a small sample.

[edit] The death of Wikipedia

Seriously now: Wikipedia is dying. Why? What can we do about it? My opinions are here, in case you care to know them.

[edit] Please do not use {{cite}} templates

Seriously too: dear fellow editor, I beg and advise you to please do not use the {{cite...}} templates to enter source references. That is not only a waste of your time, but actually a significant *dis*improvement over formatting the references by hand.

In the source text, the {{cite}} template call is at least twice as long as the hand-formatted version; it is much harder to read, and makes the surrounding text much harder to read too. The text it generates is no better than what one could get by hand, and is often much worse. For journal references, for example, it uses the compact citation format 37(10):1-23 — that was invented by technical journal publishers *to save paper*. The explicit format "volume 37, issue 10, pages 1-23" (which, by the way, is often used in the websites of technical journals) is more suited to the medium and to the typical readers of Wikipedia, who cannot be assumed to be acquanited with academic conventions.

There are several other disadvantages of the cite templates. For one thing, each variant has its own set of keywords; and if you use the wrong keyword (such as "publication" instead of "journal", or "tilte" instead of "title") the corresponding field is simply omitted without warning. It does not easily accomodate special situations, such as "Harald Stümpke [=Gerolf Steiner]" or "volume 10, pages 990-999 and volume 11, pages 1-30". If you copy-paste a reference from some external place, you will find that it is much easier to format the reference by hand than to fill in the fields of a {{cite}} call, whether directly or through the {{cite}} form. And so on.

Like many (too many) other features in Wikipedia, the cite templates were created by a handful of enthusiastic editors without a clear analysis of cost/benefits, and posted by them as if they were a "consensus" --- which they most emphatically are *not*. Then many other editors started using them in the mistaken impression that they are somehow good for Wikipedia --- which they most emphatically are *not*. I used to do that myself until I realized the sheer idiocy of those templates, and what the word "consensus" actually means in the Wikipedia guidelines.

So my advice is: forget the {{cite}} template, and just typeset the references by hand. It will save you a lot of time and grief, and you will get better-looking and more reader-friendly refs.

[edit] Proposal for out-of-body references

In May 2009 I proposed another way of adding references to Wp articles. Here is a prototype implementation of that proposal, hacked with the template mechanism:

User:Jorge Stolfi/Oxocarbon test (test page for out-of-body references)

In brief: Instead of inserting the text of bibliographic citations ("ref-entries") in the article's source, with {{Cite...}} or <ref>...</ref> , each ref-entry is placed in a separate mini-article (a "ref-page"). Each ref-page is identified by a number, and is cited by including {{../@@|nnnnn}} in the citing article's source. (If the proposal is ever adopted, the template call will become just {{@@|nnnnn}}.)

When the citing article is fetched, the references are displayed in either of two formats. The "old style" is like today, with each citation showing as ^[23] (a "ref-link") that links to a "References" section at the end of the page. in the "new style", there is no "References" section, and each ref-link displays as ^♦ that links to the corresponding ref-page.

For more details on the proposal, see

User:Jorge Stolfi/Out-of-body references (a proposal to store bibliography entries separately from the citing articles).

The prototype is presently implemented by the User:Jorge Stolfi/@@ and its sub-pages, such as User:Jorge Stolfi/@@/MakeRefNew and User:Jorge Stolfi/@@/UsersRefStyleOption. The ref-pages used in the demo are currently stored as sub-pages of User:Jorge Stolfi/@@, such as User:Jorge Stolfi/@@/63323. For each ref-page there may be a half-line "ref-snippet", stored in User:Jorge Stolfi/@@/63323-s, which is displayed as a popup when the mouse hovers over the "♦".

Thanks to User:Plastikspork for carefully "userifying" the "@@" template, and to User:Ruslik0 for decisive help with the wiki template language.