Template talk:Username display restrictions since when

I don't understand that policy at all. Both Esolang:Policy and Esolang:Authors doesn't explain what is being prevented by adding it. (by the way, people value low on esolangs created by non-famous (within this community) people with User: prefix, but maybe it's just my imagination)

I have several questions:

• Since when is the policy hardcoded? (It seems to be recent) and by who?
• How come it's important enough to warrant a hardcoding?
• There are tons of userpage links hiding the User: prefix in earlier times, like in Circuit Diagram, bf algorithms, and another i can't find, and they are kept that way. Why are they ought to be kept???

If the policy is added to prevent something bad or for another important reason, please include that part in Esolang:Authors. If not, and it is not important in any other way (unlikely, otherwise why hardcode it?), please remove it. Iddi01 (talk) 08:44, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi! First, your questions:

• You can view the history of pages by clicking the "View history" link at the top. So, in this case, it's easy to go look up which edits are responsible: [1] [2] [3] [4]
• Policy which isn't written down is unfair.
• Not all edits made to the wiki are following our policies. You can fix them by applying the policy in an edit.

In general, it sounds like you're not taking Esolang:Authors seriously, particularly this part: "Esolang inventors and authors may have their own pages in the standard namespace. … These pages should be biographical, not personal, and should be written, Wikipedia-style, from a neutral point of view. … Contrast user pages … which are more like personal home pages and are typically edited only by the user." The standard namespace is for biographies, including biographies of people who don't edit.

I understand some of your "value low" complaint, but it's irrelevant. This wiki isn't for building cults of personality around programming languages or attracting new users, but documenting languages and the people who author them.

Also, as a side note, this talk page isn't attached to the policies in question. If you actually want the policy to change, then you need to directly address it rather than venting in an unattached page on an unrelated namespace. Corbin (talk) 18:44, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

You're wrong. Isn't User:ais523 famous enough (There is a page for him on the wiki and he is even an admin), but he still has user prefix on the languages he created like this page. --None1 (Nope.) 10:37, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Did you even read that carefully? I did not object to people making the User: prefix visible! And just because he's famous, it doesn't matter if he used the User: prefix and people don't value low on his esolangs. And, one of the questions is that why in earlier times many people didn't include the User: prefix in their pages. The reason for posting this is that i need to know why exactly the policy has been added and why it's so important that it's hardcoded. Only ais523 can correctly answer those questions, so anyone else please don't talk here anymore. Iddi01 (talk) 11:01, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

If you're interested in how the policy came about – originally, the wiki's policy (which was decided before I first arrived here) was that userspace pages should not be linked at all, and you can read Esolang talk:Authors to see the original discussion. In general, articles are supposed to be written neutrally, i.e. not from any particular person's point of view. Over time, this gradually mellowed out to "you can link user pages, but the User: prefix must be visible" as a compromise between the "no linking at all" policy, and many people's desire to link anyway. In general, many people here like to have a warning when a link goes to something other than a neutrally written article on Esolang; user pages are generally the work of just one person rather than the community, and don't necessarily give a fair view of what a language is about, so people should have a warning that they're going to a page which might potentially be biased. (Bear in mind that, until recently when people started creating specifications for unimplemented esolangs in very large numbers at very high rates, this wiki wasn't the primary/original source for most esolangs – and there are still a lot of esolangs created offsite which aren't documented here, meaning that many esolang descriptions wouldn't/shouldn't have a local user page to link to anyway.) The prefixes-on-links policy has expanded over time, e.g. originally this wiki was effectively considered an extension of Wikipedia (except without the rules against original research and unverifiable content), and links to Wikipedia would look like internal links, but nowadays they're expected to be prefixed as, e.g. wikipedia:INTERCAL, and an admin (not me, a different one) recently changed the site software so that it would render as an external rather than internal link.

As for why the rule is being enforced automatically now: we used to enforce it manually, but the rate of edits to the wiki is now high enough to make manual enforcement difficult, especially because it's so commonly broken. I'm already having trouble keeping up with all the admin work that the wiki needs, given that a) none of the other admins are particularly active at the moment and b) the editing rate has increased by a factor of around 20 since I joined – I used to read every edit, but that isn't really possible any more. Additionally, people might not know the rule, so having a reminder to let them know is helpful. The automatic enforcement isn't as good as manual enforcement would be, because some people seem to take it as a challenge to try to get around the restriction rather than as a reminder of the rules, but it saves the admin team (i.e. primarily me) some amount of time in catching rule breaches that I would otherwise have to find myself. --ais523 21:41, 17 October 2024 (UTC)