Talk:Cydia/Archives/2010/February

Misc

> Cydia is *usually* installed on an iPhone via jailbreaking

Are there other ways? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.106.36.209 (talk) 11:22, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

No , there aren't any other ways. Cydia requires full access to filesystem. PCrew00 14:22, 5 April 2009 (UTC)

> Can somebody please write an introduction to Cydia which is understandable as well for people who aren't nerds? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.212.14.223 (talk) 11:50, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk pages are not for discussing general questions, but simply for discussion on the editing of the article. Brian Reading (talk) 17:49, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

I think most of these questions so far have been helpful in pointing out parts of the article that needed clarification...but anyway, I agree with 94.212.14.223 that the introduction was a little obscure, expecting the reader to recognize "APT" and "dpkg". I tried adding a plainer first sentence. Dreamyshade (talk) 18:46, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

The reason we use Wikilinks is to allow readers to further research if they do not understand what something is. For example, if a reader didn't understand what a "video game" was in the sentence "Tap Tap Revolution is a video game.", then there is the ability to click and understand that topic. Some things simply can't be dumbed down enough without losing its meaning. Computer science is a field of science just like any natural science. You wouldn't head to the Chemical compound article, and expect them to rewrite the introduction to not use terms like "Chemical substance" or "Coordinate covalent bonds". Basically, to reword it would disallow those willing to simply click and read to have a good understanding. That's a shame. Brian Reading (talk) 02:44, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm thinking of this part of the Manual of Style: Wikipedia:Lead section#Provide an accessible overview. If I was explaining Cydia to a friend, I would say a high-level overview like "it's a way to download non-Apple-approved applications after you jailbreak your iPhone" rather than "it's an interface for APT". I think there can be an accurate and useful lead sentence without requiring specialized knowledge, although my initial attempt probably isn't perfect. Dreamyshade (talk) 05:10, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

When you represent Cydia as anything else other than a GUI, you are distorting the situation. Cydia is NOT a way to download non-Apple-approved applications. It is a GUI to a way. APT and dpkg is the actual way. To disregard that, and pretend that there are such things as "Cydia applications" and that apps are actually being "distributed through" Cydia is just flat-out incorrect. The apps are being distributed using APT, and Cydia allows users to have a GUI interface rather than a text-based one. That is the entirety of it. Although it is important to provide accessibility to readers, it is more important to introduce only facts to the article. There are some topics that require anterior knowledge to understand, and this is one of them. For example, if a person didn't know what a Nation state was, they would have a difficult time understanding an article about Australia. This doesn't mean that we change the facts to allow someone without the necessary knowledge to get a distorted gist of it. I appreciate your contributions to the article, and hope this doesn't come off as uncivil. Thanks. Brian Reading (talk) 18:37, 9 August 2009 (UTC)

But Brian, you also have to take into account that the Apple iPhone and ipod Touch are mass-market devices, there's media interest in jailbreaking, and perhaps the majority of people reading this article might be iP/iPT owners who aren't computing majors, who want to find out what this Cydia thing is that people keep referring to in the YouTube "How to jailbreak your iPhone" videos. Saying that those people shouldn't be reading the article unless they're prepared to go away and read up on APT and dpkg first isn't fair, and if all wikipedia article authors took that attitude, then perhaps the APT and dpkg articles might in turn expect the reader to go away and read a set of further articles first, and so on. The first papragraph of a wp article should be as self-explanatory and free from jargon as possible. Ideally, the whole introduction should be intelligible to most Wikipedia users, with the more scary material moved to the body article. For the benefit of anyone who then cares enough about the subject to read the entire introduction, or the entire article, you can then include a section stressing that Cydia is "merely" a user interface that sits on top of APT/dpkg. But you don't define or explain Cydia in the opening paragraph in a way that requires foreknowledge of APT/dpkg on the part of the user, any more that you'd write a wikipedia article "explaining" what a virus is by presupposing that all interested readers knew (or cared) what amino acids are, or an article "explaining" email as being a set of application and gui layers sitting on top of a set of named packet transfer and communication protocols.

To use your "Australia" example, Australia isn't just a nation state, it is also an continent and an island, and a place on the map. A politics major might argue that the concept of "Australia" needs to be defined in a purely political and historical context, but a geologist might argue that politics is irrelevant to understanding what "Australia" really is, and that anyone reading an article on Australia needs to have some prior understanding of plate tectonics, or the concept "Australia" won't make sense. But to a little kid looking up the wikipedia article, who knows nothing about politics or continental drift, Australia is still perfectly intelligible as "that funny place where the koala bears come from". The kid might want to know where Australia is, what the weather and scenery is like, and what other funny animals it has. To them, Australia is a "place", and the constitutional status and tectonic boundaries might be trivia compared to the more important defining characteristics of it having kangaroos and duck billed platypuses.

What I'm trying to say is that there's often more than one technically correct logical way of looking at what an article "is" or should be. There are often multiple correct answers. To an iPhone user, Cydia perhaps really is that icon thing that lets them download software onto a jailbroken phone, and the fact that it happens to use a particular set of underlying code is less interesting. Perhaps even trivia. Perhaps all they need from the article is that one opening descriptive sentence, explaining how Cydia fits into the rest of their life, and they don't need to read anything else in the article. Dreamyshade's summary is valid: to most end-users, there's no functional distinction between a way to do something and "the GUI to the way": the GUI, or the clickable program or buyable product is the way. They interact with email programs without knowing or caring about the engineering differences between POP and IMAP, the internet is the thing that connects their computers togetehr, they don't care what the packet-routing protocols are, or what processor's in their iPhone, or that a cat has 38 chromosomes. If a geneticist writes a Wikipedia article on cats, they may feel that it's overpoweringly important that the fact that cats have 38 chromosomes goes into the first sentence, but to most people, this is an irrelevance.

The "engineering" description (APT/dpkg do all the work, Cydia is merely the user interface), goes into the body of the article, or perhaps into the latter parts of the introduction. But a technical structural definition using jargon that's only intelligible to specialists normally doesn't go into the first sentence or the first paragraph. ErkDemon (talk) 16:54, 24 January 2010 (UTC)

I respect your attempt to make the article conform to Wikipedia guidelines, but I don't agree with your reasoning. Australia certainly isn't just a nation state, however the Australia article is focusing on the country. There is a separate article for the continent. The purpose of separating the articles is because Australia is legitimately and scientifically two separate concepts. Cydia, which is simply a graphical user interface, is not. Even featured articles require anterior knowledge to understand. Take a look at ROT13, where a reader is required to understand what a substitution cipher is. Rosetta@home specifically states that it is a distributed computing project for protein structure prediction in the first sentence. OpenBSD expects readers to know what a Unix-like operating system is in the first sentence. My point is that you cannot simply rewrite things in such a vague way, as to leave out the core definition of what something is. In the OpenBSD article, in which I pointed out that a reader must understand what an operating system is (a concept that most non-technical savvy people don't understand), it would be inappropriate to rewrite the lead sentence to state: "OpenBSD is a piece of software that lets users control a computer." The reason why is that it disregards the core concepts of OpenBSD as a Unix-like operating system. In the same way that OpenBSD could be "that icon thing that lets them control their computer", it's mostly not end-user function that defines what something is when we're talking about software. Brian Reading (talk) 07:00, 3 February 2010 (UTC)