- A discussion about sigs is likely to be even more distracting but now you've got me started. Having refreshed my memory, here's my story:
- I disapprove of ostentatious sigs and so, for most of my time on Wikipedia, I have had a vanilla signature without any formatting
- But I don't like long signature either and so started truncating them
- I now edit using my real name and so need to be mindful of stalkers. So, for a while, I started truncating my sig to "Andrew D." rather than the name in full
- But there are lots of other Andrew D's on Wikipedia including Andy Dingley and Andrew Dalby. So I was not content with that either.
- Last year I noticed that there was an admin called 😂. He was being desysopped but not for that reason. It was interesting that he had a username of just a single emoji so that got me thinking.
- It occurred to me that a dragon emoji might work well. This would have some thematic value as I consider myself to be a Dragon. The dragon emoji also looks like the letter D in some fonts that I use and that was good too.
- The emoji is just a single character and, by replacing " D.", made my sig two characters shorter. Andrew🐉 is just seven characters and so this is half the length of Rhododendrites, which is 14. Note also that it requires no special markup and so, when using the text editor, it still only occupies 7 characters whereas Rhododendrites takes about 100 characters to specify the font size, letter spacing, text-shadow, colour, &c. It's elaborate markup like this that makes editing talk-pages so intimidating to ordinary readers.
- There's still the issue of ostentation but a single character is comparatively modest compared to other garish sigs. And after 14+ years of editing, I feel reasonably entitled to some small vanity.
- More generally, I like adding graphics and pictures to our pages as they are otherwise a dull wall-of-text. That's why, for example, I added the picture of the St Bernard.
- If editors can't stand such ornamentation then there's a technical remedy. See the Unclutter signature minimiser.
- As for William Harris, they should note that there's a paw print emoji (🐾), which might be used in place of the file links to make his sig tighter and compliant with WP:SIGIMAGE. There are also some cute dog emojis including 🐕, 🐩, 🦮 and 🐶!
- Andrew🐉(talk) 16:38, 29 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for the detailed reply. :) I do appreciate the thought behind the dragon. It's true that my sig takes up more bytes, and it's a fair point that new users looking at the wikimarkup might not like seeing extra html/css/whatnot. Worth a conversation. For me, talk pages are all about the thoughts expressed, and pictures in the text are just incredibly distracting such that if there's too much in a thread I sometimes decide not to bother. It's hard not to be frustrated when one person insists (intentionally or not) on making my eyes go to their words above all others. Same with text highlighting, prohibitions on which, to my chagrin, have been rejected. So I appreciate I'm in the minority on some of this. I got the sense that pictures-in-signatures was something most people were behind in appreciating their potential for distraction, but I may be in the minority on that as well. Anyway, sorry for the tangent here. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 16:58, 29 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
- My thanks to both of you; I was not aware that this breached WP:SIGIMAGE and I will be changing it shortly. William Harris
talk 01:16, 30 August 2020 (UTC)[reply]
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