Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software by James J. Brown Jr

Author:James J. Brown Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of Michigan Press
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

MediaWiki: The Username and the Archive

Like any piece of software, MediaWiki has its quirks. One of these quirks seems innocuous enough—MediaWiki has idiosyncratic capitalization rules. Page 110 →In fact, even explaining these rules (let alone navigating them in a MediaWiki installation) can make your head spin. As Daniel Barrett explains in his MediaWiki (Wikipedia and Beyond), MediaWiki’s capitalization rules cause confusion when it comes to article titles. Consider an article entitled “Hello World.” MediaWiki software treats “hello world” the same as “Hello world.” That is, both of these phrases would link to the same article. But the article entitled “Hello World” (both “H” and “W” capitalized) links to an entirely different article.12 This problem can be fixed with a “disambiguation page” that serves as a place to sort out similarly named articles. Most visitors to Wikipedia are familiar with this concept. For instance, Wikipedia’s disambiguation page for “Interpol” provides links to, among other things, articles for an indie rock band, a video game, and International Criminal Police Organization. A “Hello World” disambiguation page could link together the three titles mentioned above regardless of their capitalization. Barrett argues that these capitalization rules are in place for aesthetic reasons: “MediaWiki displays a title with its first letter capitalized because it looks nicer than using all lowercase.”13 This aesthetic choice makes for confusion, but it also stands as an ethical choice, one that has farther-reaching ramifications than the look of article titles.

These capitalization rules present challenges when it comes to usernames. Because of these rules, usernames must begin with a capital letter. Brion Vibber, chief technology officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, explains that these capitalization rules extend to usernames because usernames are “a subset of page titles, and must follow the rules for page titles.”14 Because usernames are incorporated into certain page titles—each user has a “user page” that is automatically generated when they set up an account—these usernames are subject to the same capitalization rules as articles. This reveals one of MediaWiki’s assumptions with regard to user identity and permissions. As far as MediaWiki software is concerned, usernames are part of a larger grouping called “page titles.” In many ways, the MediaWiki database sees little difference between the article for “Rafting” and my Wikipedia username (Jamesjbrownjr). Both are lines in the relational database structure, and both are subject to the same capitalization rules (if I manually enter the URL to either of these entities with a lower-case letter, MediaWiki will automatically capitalize it). The capitalization rule’s effect on usernames would seem to be minimal. Who, after all, really cares if their username is capitalized? But it has proven to be enough of an annoyance that a MediaWiki developer named “GhostInTheMachine” designed a solution that he says “is not nice enough to be called an extension” (he calls it a “hack”).15 This hack is incomplete, and this is most likely because “GhostInTheMachine” and other programmers extending the MediaWiki platform are up against the difficulties of MediaWiki’s Page 111 →database. As

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