Erik Moeller wrote:
I presume the conference where you heard about
Wikipedia was the World-
InfoCon. If so, did you by any chance hear about it on day two from Volker
Grassmuck? He's a friend of mine, and a couple of weeks before the con he
called me and asked me about cool projects in the area of collaborative
journalism and peer-to-peer networks. I told him about Wikipedia, and he
promised to bring it up at the conference. If that's where you heard about
it, I can take at least some small credit for you being here now :-)
You're right, it was at the World-InfoCon, from Volker Grassmuck.
Actually, though, several speakers at the conference talked about
Wikipedia.
HTML anchors are not yet implemented, but this is a
project I'd be willing
to tackle. We just need a nifty syntax.
How about just including them with section headers? For example, take
the following line of wiki syntax:
=== Geography and Climate ===
Right now this produces the following HTML:
<h3> Geography and Climate </h3>
It shouldn't take a lot of work to make the same wiki syntax produce
the following HTML:
<a name="Geography_and_Climate"><h3> Geography and Climate
</h3>
This implementation would only make it possible to insert HTML
anchors at the beginning of section headers, but that should cover
most of the places where people might want to have them. Then to
create a hyperlink to the "Geography and Climate" section of the
"Russia" article, you'd simply use the following syntax:
[[Russia#Geography and Climate]]
Do I understand you correctly when I
assume that when you want a link like [[person:George W. Bush]], you want
to later be able to link to this page by just using [[George W. Bush]],
but use the "person" prefix during page creation to choose a proper
template? In that case, the question would arise what would happen to this
qualifier after the page has been created.
Yes, that's true. The specifics of my proposed implementation are
half-baked. The broader concept, though, is the idea of being able to
object-type articles as a way of imposing some kind of structure.
Maybe this is just fundamentally antithetical to the free-form nature
of Wikipedia, but I see that someone else is thinking along rather
similar lines with the proposal for a "Slotipedia."
--
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Editor, PR Watch (
www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
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