On 10/15/07, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Cross-posted to wikien-l and wikitech-l.
David Gerard wrote:
On 13/10/2007, Phil Sandifer
<Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
At the very least, we should move things like
WikiProjects, GA
nomination statuses, and other such pieces of processcruft to a
subpage and transclude it so that newbies trying to discuss on talk
pages just get "{{single template link}}". We could probably afford
to do the same with infoboxes and the like on main articles - move
them to a subpage and transclude a single template. Yes, it makes
editing the infobox a step less intuitive, but someone who can't
figure that step out probably can't handle the template syntax anyway.
That'sa fantastically good idea! See if it flies on the Village Pump,
etc. A bot run would be enough once you have something acceptable to
the VP and the most template-heavy projects.
I don't think it's a good idea at all.
Instead, I would suggest having two edit boxes on the edit page -- one
at the top for templates, and a second one for the main article text.
You mean, like the on-the-fly separation (and reintegration) of
language links, categories, and "invisible/at-the-end-of-the-article"
templates I hacked into the core code during the Berlin CCC in 2005?
2004? ;-)
Seriously, I think separation of such meta-data on the fly is possible
and should be attempted again. Part of which would encompass
header/footer templates. Maybe "surround" the main edit box with three
(initially hidden) boxes, on the top (header templates, infoboxes), on
the right (categories, interlanguage), and bottom (bottom templates,
end-of-article navboxes).
If this too extreme, maybe we could create bogus section links that
would /only/ show top or bottom templates in the edit box.
Cheers,
Magnus