james mckay dot net

There’s a discussion over on the Colemak forums at the moment about the Wikipedia problem. It seems that, not content with having the article deleted on the grounds of non-notability a while ago, some Wikipedians are trying to eradicate every last mention of the layout from anywhere on the site. The deletion decision had eventually ended up as a redirect to a section on the Keyboard layout article, but it seems that even that’s been removed now, by a particularly argumentative individual who is rigidly and inflexibly applying his interpretation of the Reliable Sources policy.

Now as a satisfied Colemak typist I may be somewhat biased on this matter, but this one should be obvious. Colemak may be a pretty niche subject, but it has been covered a couple of times in the media—not a lot, but usually sufficient to at least get a “no consensus” decision in an AfD debate, which automatically defaults to “keep.” On top of that, it is included in X11 and every Linux distribution going. It’s one of only about half a dozen options for keyboard layout variant displayed on the installation screens of Ubuntu. It’s right in your face, not tucked away in some obscure and dangerous config file. Everyone who installs Ubuntu will be aware of it. Some of them will want to find out more about it. And they will expect Wikipedia to say something about it. But it won’t.

Of course, if it were just Colemak that were affected, I’m sure you could just dismiss this as a fanboy rant on my part, but this actually illustrates a much wider problem. With over three million articles, on everything from minor league ice hockey players to fictional foods in Babylon 5, Wikipedia is now the first place people turn to for information on anything obscure and only marginally notable. Wikipedia’s end users expect it to be an indiscriminate collection of information. Yet an indiscriminate collection of information is one of the things that Wikipedians are adamant that Wikipedia is not.

This is like being told that a problem in Sage or QuickBooks that is causing your tax return to be filled out with gibberish is not a bug, but a feature.

The problem is that there is a massive disconnect between Wikipedia’s users—casual visitors who often don’t even bother to create an account—and its overlords—the regular, active Wikipedians with edit counts in the thousands or even tens of thousands and an encyclopaedic knowledge and understanding of its policies. It is at its most striking in the whole inclusionist versus deletionist debate. And the deletionists are alienating a lot of would-be Wikipedians.

It turns out that this is one of the biggest criticisms levelled at Wikipedia by occasional editors. People come onto the site knowing nothing of Wikpedia’s policies, but plenty about some—possibly very niche—subject. They make half a dozen or so edits, then return a week later to find that their article has been deleted with no apparent explanation. Or perhaps it will be flagged with a deletion debate, crammed full of arcane and cabalistic abbreviations such as WP:NFT, WP:NOTE, WP:V, WP:WAX, WP:SOAP, WP:IAR, and so on, all pointing to Wikipedia’s byzantine and convoluted policies, guidelines and procedures. What kind of impression does this leave the casual editor? That Wikipedia is a hideout for a bunch of antisocial, bureaucratic teenage control freaks—a kind of online equivalent to the kids on the beach who kick the sandcastle you’ve just spent three hours building into your face. And since first impressions count the most, they will go off, never contribute anything else, and rant on blogs and forums about how insular and out of touch with Real Life these Wikipedians are.

Why is this harming Wikipedia? Because these are the people who contribute the overwhelming majority of substantive, meaningful content to the site.

This study by Aaron Swartz will be particularly enlightening to anyone who doubts this claim. His research on a data dump of Wikipedia indicated that most contributions of actual substantive content are made by new and casual users, many of whom never even create an account and most of whom only make a handful of edits to the site. Regular Wikipedians, on the other hand, tend to spend most of their time tidying things up—moving text around, correcting spelling mistakes, wikifying things—and deleting stuff.

I’ve sometimes looked at these deletion debates and wondered how many of the people voting for deletion with reference to obscure areas of Wiki policy even begin to understand the subject matter of the article under discussion itself. Some of the arguments for deletion of Colemak are laughable for starters. They’d have us belive that nobody uses it (a brief glance at the activity on the forums and the Facebook group and even the AfD debate itself will quickly dispel this notion); that X11 is an anarchic free-for-all where you could submit a patch containing a rootkit backdoor and it would be accepted; and that the only way to enable Colemak in Ubuntu is to edit some obscure and dangerous config file where it’s buried in a list of gazillions of options and a slight typo will make your computer unbootable.

Certainly, searches for reliable sources are usually cursory: no hits on Google News, no hits on Google Scholar, so delete. Blogs are automatically not considered reliable sources, even if they’re written by experts in the industry such as Tim Bray, Simon Willison or Jeff Atwood. In fact, Jeff Atwood’s Wikipedia entry also fell foul of the deletionists a year ago, when Stack Overflow was in public beta, which shows just how completely out of touch with reality they are. (Incidentally, web development is one area in particular where WP:RS is a very bad metric for notability, simply because it’s an industry where a lot of key activity happens at the grassroots level. The sources that web developers regard as reliable enough for practical purposes are generally high profile blogs like Jeff’s, while the academics writing papers on how to use lines of code per day as a productivity metric are frequently regarded as an irrelevance at best and harmful at worst.)

There’s also a lot of bluster and bullying goes on when the deletionists crop up. Throwing acronyms around sends a signal to newbies that they’re not welcome. If you Twitter about a deletion debate, you’re accused of canvassing and booed off. Anonymous accounts and new users are often regarded with suspicion as potential sock puppets. Most people find it hostile and intimidating, and perhaps even a bit childish, but the deletionists don’t care. They’re so obsessed with making Wikipedia what they think it should be that they’ve completely lost sight of the end users.

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Posted at 13:00 on 2 February 2010.
Tagged: colemak, deletionism, Wikipedia

Earlier this week I took delivery of a new laptop at work. Because I use Colemak with my Microsoft Natural 4000 keyboard and qwerty when the ergonomic option is not available (unfortunately I find flat keyboards and Colemak just don’t mix, though the Colemak/ergo combination is light years ahead in terms of comfort) this means I am likely to be switching to and fro between the two layouts a lot more on the same machine.

Unfortunately, the Windows keyboard switcher is completely insane in this respect. It’s maddening that it sets your keyboard layout separately for each individual window rather than letting you set it across the board for all the windows that you have open, and even more so that it doesn’t give you an option to change this behaviour.

But it gets worse. In IE8 you can set the keyboard layout individually for each tab. This meant that at one point this morning I had Colemak in Twitter and qwerty in the browser’s address bar.

Yes, I know there’s the whole thing about each tab being in a separate process, but Google Chrome has a similar architecture and gets this right. Microsoft: this is a bug, not a feature. Please fix it.

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Posted at 23:05 on 5 June 2009.
Tagged: colemak, IE8, qwerty, typing

I surpassed 70 words per minute on Colemak for the first time today. I have now all but abandoned qwerty…

(For those of you who are getting bored with me being a noisy Colemak fanboy, this will be the last of it round here — promise. I’ve started up a separate blog for that.)

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Posted at 17:56 on 4 February 2008.
Tagged: colemak, typing

Over the past week or so I’ve been trying out the Colemak keyboard layout again. I’ve been a bit ambivalent about it up to now, partly because I found some Colemak users a bit too enthusiastic, but more because I was getting thoroughly disillusioned with ye olde Kinesis keyboard, so my attention to it has been rather intermittent, to say the least.

However, unlike Michael Kaplan of Microsoft’s International Fundamentals team (that’s the mob that decide which keyboard layouts get included with Windows and which don’t), who dismisses it out of hand because he thinks they’re too zealous, I have actually tried it out, and on Ryan Heise’s typing test the other day I managed about fifty words per minute with it. That is about as fast as most people type, and faster than anything I managed with Dvorak. Impressive, even if it is only about two thirds of my qwerty speed.

Since Colemak is so similar to qwerty, and many of the keys stay in the same place, it is vastly easier to learn than Dvorak if you are an existing qwerty typist, and it is also much easier to retain fluency in qwerty while you’re at it. I’ve managed to get this far with surprisingly little effort using a “qwerty by day, Colemak by night” approach, which has the added advantage that it doesn’t interfere with your productivity while you’re learning.

So will I stick with it? I don’t know at this stage. It certainly seems more comfortable and disciplined for normal text, but I’ve found that it tends to get in the way a bit when I’m trying to write code, especially in C# or JavaScript. However, I now find it pretty easy to switch to and fro between the two layouts depending on which one takes my fancy at any given time, so I may well do. Colemak for text-based work and qwerty for code seems to be a strategy with quite a lot of mileage in it.

Quite how much you stand to gain from learning it I am not sure: the rough impression that I get from people’s reports is that speed gains are of the order of 20% or so at best, so your mileage may vary. Personally, I don’t consider qwerty to be the disaster area that its detractors make it out to be — loads of people use it without complaint, and I can manage a fairly respectable, if indisciplined and inaccurate, 80 words per minute or so with it. However, if you are particularly frustrated with it — and emphatically if you’re thinking of learning Dvorak — Colemak may be worth a try. Since it is dramatically easier to learn, it renders Dvorak a total waste of time. Colemak is also well known for its enthusiastic and lively community, who, although some of them can get a bit carried away with themselves at times, are actually quite helpful and supportive, and more than willing to give advice if you need it.

Alternatively, of course, there is always voice recognition software…

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Posted at 19:05 on 11 January 2008.
Tagged: colemak, dvorak, qwerty, typing

I’ve decided to call it a day with my Kinesis keyboard.

This hasn’t been an easy decision. The Kinesis Advantage is a very nice piece of hardware, and I actually quite like it. Once you get used to it, it is very comfortable to type with, though you need to use Dvorak or Colemak to make the most of it. However, there is one very important thing that I have never been able to get used to on it: programming.

I’ve tried it with qwerty, and with Dvorak, and more recently in the past couple of weeks with Colemak, but these haven’t made any difference. The fact remains that there are some keys which are rarely used in normal typing that are used very frequently in writing code. Keys such as the square and curly brackets, the backslash, plus, minus and equals, and the cursor keys. These are frustratingly awkwardly placed on the Kinesis, and I have never managed to get used to them.

Yes, I know that the keyboard is reprogrammable, but you would have to reprogram something else in their places, and that something else would just be as awkward.

A while ago, someone left a comment on my blog assuring me that I would get used to it and I just needed to bear with it. Well, I’ve now had it for eighteen months and I still haven’t got used to it. There comes a point when you just have to face the fact that something isn’t going anywhere and you need to throw in the towel.

Since programming is what earns me my daily bread, I just can’t carry on regardless.

I’m going back to the Microsoft Natural line of keyboards, which are a tried and trusted solution that I’ve always found very satisfactory. I’ve ordered myself a new Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000 keyboard, and I am expecting delivery on Wednesday. I first saw one earlier this year on a visit to a client and I was fairly impressed with it. The key beds are curved slightly to make it more ergonomic, though the effect is much more subtle than the Kinesis. And while the £30 price tag may sound a tad extravagant given that keyboards come pretty much free with computers these days anyway, it is a lot more reasonable than the £225 you spend on a Kinesis. Besides, I don’t like flat keyboards that don’t give you the separation between the hands.

I’m not sure whether I will settle for one of the alternative layouts in the end. I found them almost essential on the Kinesis, on which qwerty is particularly cumbersome, but on more conventional keyboards the difference seems much smaller to me, and probably not worth the effort involved in switching. I never managed to match my qwerty typing speed on Dvorak, and now that I’ve switched back over the past few days I’ve realised that I can manage quite a good rate on qwerty, though I haven’t actually measured it properly. There is also the Remote Desktop Problem — when you have to use other computers, alternative layouts tend to get in the way somewhat. Besides, I’ve expended far too much time and energy on this whole kettle of fish and I am rather disinclined to experiment any further now.

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Posted at 14:00 on 9 October 2007.
Tagged: colemak, dvorak, ergonomic keyboards, typing

I’ve now been typing in Dvorak for about six weeks, and it finally seems to have clicked. This is my fourth attempt, and this time it all slotted into place after about two weeks. Unlike my previous attempt, this time I have had no discomfort, probably because I am using my Kinesis keyboard almost exclusively now both at work and at home, and avoiding flat keyboards like the plague.

I wouldn’t claim to be the world’s fastest typist yet, but it has certainly improved my keyboard discipline. I am now at last able to touch type properly in a way that I was never able to do on qwerty, for starters, and this in turn means that I am finally getting the most out of my Kinesis contoured keyboard. It’s also fun to see people’s reactions when they try to use my keyboard and find that not only are they confused by the shape of the thing, it doesn’t give them the letters that they expect. Hehe…

One thing I have found however is that while Dvorak is a definite improvement for text, the difference is smaller when you are programming, particularly in a curly-brackety language like C# or JavaScript, since you are making much more use of numbers and symbols. Having said that, a lot of what you have to do as a programmer involves writing text — comments, specs and the like — so it is still an improvement anyway.

I decided in the end not to bother with any of the other alternative layouts. I briefly tried Colemak, and while my initial impressions were favourable, I came to the conclusion in the end that its advantages over Dvorak are too small to be worth bothering with. It seemed to work relatively well on a flat laptop keyboard but for some reason I found it no easier to get to grips with on my Kinesis than Dvorak.

There are actually several qwerty derivatives knocking about, and the main thing that makes Colemak different from, say, Asset or Arensito is its small but noisy fanboy community. Its Wikipedia article was deleted back in November on the grounds of non-notability and has since been protected to prevent re-creation, much to the disgust of the fanboys. Yeah, there was the CapsOff million dollar competition, but it seems that was an obscure affair where it turns out that the prize money was entirely funded by donations. Given that the CapsOff website says that they would list all donations on the website, and I couldn’t find any listed anywhere, it seems that Colemak won its designer a lot less than the touted million dollars by a very large margin. Sure, it may become more popular, but I’ve already put in enough effort switching to Dvorak, so I think I’ll give it a miss for now.

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Posted at 13:03 on 23 August 2007.
Tagged: colemak, dvorak, fanboys, typing

Well just a couple of days after I reinstalled Windows on my laptop, the screen finally decided to die. This means that until I get it replaced, I’m offline in the evenings and at weekends. It’s about time I replaced my laptop anyway though. It’s now nearly four years old, and while it’s still perfectly serviceable, it’s beginning to get a bit geriatric in computer terms now. It weighs a ton and feels like having a fan heater sitting on your lap, it gets that hot.

I think this will give my wrists a bit of a well-earned rest. They’ve been getting a bit sore with my recent experiments with /(Dvor|Colem)ak/. Shai Coleman, the designer of Colemak, responded to a comment that I made on the Colemak forums saying that you do experience some discomfort initially, but it goes if you persist. However, I am still on qwerty at work and that isn’t likely to change now.

I’ll still be blogging when I get a chance, however. I’ll just be relying on pen and paper a lot more for the first draft of each entry. I think this speeds up the process somewhat though. I tend to be something of a perfectionist at times: I find it all too easy to either (a) over-research my blog posts, or (b) spend too long editing, chopping and changing them, and just having a pen and paper puts a bit of a restraining hand on me from both these tendencies, since I have to write it all offline in one pass without recourse to Wikipedia.

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Posted at 18:13 on 3 July 2007.
Tagged: blogging, colemak, dvorak, laptop

I have given up on Dvorak once and for all. It does make for much more disciplined typing, but I found that just as I was getting up to speed on it, I was beginning to experience some discomfort in my right hand and arm. There are some nasty artefacts in Dvorak, perhaps the worst of which is the position of the L key, in the top right hand corner of the keyboard. Having to stretch your pinky as much as that gets really sore after a while. Since the main reason why I started looking into alternative keyboard layouts was that for the past two years I have been experiencing some general fatigue and mild discomfort on and off in my right arm in the first place, I thought that it would be prudent to take note. I was also finding it very uncomfortable to type URLs on my Kinesis keyboard, where said pinky has to do the Riverdance to handle the forward slash and the shift key for the colon, then move out of the way to let your right middle finger handle the “www”.

At the moment I am back on QWERTY at work and hating it. However, there is a very promising new kid on the block as far as keyboard layouts are concerned: Colemak. Unlike Dvorak, it takes QWERTY as its starting point and only shuffles some of the keys around, leaving almost all the punctuation and symbols and some of the less frequently used letters in pretty much the same place. This makes for a much more comfortable typing experience that is also much easier to learn, and it has none of the nasty artefacts of Dvorak either.

After only two or three evenings, I am already more comfortable with it than I was after three weeks of going completely cold turkey on Dvorak on my first attempt back in July 2000. It also seems that switching to and fro between QWERTY and Colemak will be much easier than switching back and fro between QWERTY and Dvorak. You can get full instructions on how to use it, and a Windows installer, from the Colemak website. Hopefully it won’t be too long before I am good enough at it to be able to use it at work too.

Update: I didn’t eventually switch to Colemak in the end. (See discussion.)

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Posted at 20:59 on 20 June 2007.
Tagged: colemak, dvorak, qwerty, typing