[WikiEN-l] Newbie friendliness, markup hell, and editing structure

[Oldak Quill]

On 12/03/2008, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
>  >  Great work. Would it be possible to adapt this into a tool to separate
>  >  the source of an article into: references and everything else?
>  >
>  >  Slightly different: would it be possible to have an editing interface
>  >  where tags of the form "<ref name="">{{template}}</ref>" in the body
>  >  are pulled out to a separate text box, leaving a token in the body
>  >  text (e.g. <ref name="" />)? Separating the content of these tags
>  >  would clean up the body when editing and the token left in the body
>  >  would indicate that there is a tag here and that it has this name (see
>  >  ref text box).
>
>
> OK, I took the challenge. I integrated a reference management tool.
>  Works like this:
>  * It extracts all <ref></ref> tags from the text
>  * It replaces them with "<<REF1>>", "<<REF2>>", etc.
>  * These special tags are valid only during editing; upon preview,
>  diff, or save, they are replaced with the original
>  * This is /not/ done if the text already contains something like
>  "<<REFX>>" (X being any number), so it won't mess up texts
>  * It also does not touch "repeated refs" (<ref name="xyz"/>)
>
>  Below the normal text box, there is now a list box, one line per
>  reference, containing number, name (if set), and text of the
>  reference. You can
>  * select a line, and it will highlight the corresponding <<REF>> in
>  the text (no scrolling there yet; working on it)
>  * double-click the line, and edit name and text in a dialog
>  * select a reference and delete it
>
>  In the text boxes, you can
>  * select the <<REF>> tag (double-clicking it will do), and it shows
>  the corresponding reference in the list
>  * insert a new reference at the current position (name and text dialogs again)
>
>  I have taken care to "default to standard", that is, things will not
>  be changed (even temporarily) unless it's safe to do so.
>
>  Also, new screenshot, editing yesterday's article of the day, [[John
>  Knox]], with the reference management:
>
> http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/less_page_clutter.png
>
>
> Even in this huge, real-life example, the only changes the script
>  would do (as seen in a diff) are alphabetical reordering of language
>  links and categories.

Thank you! This should really help with references. It makes the body
in the edit window look a lot cleaner (hopefully less confusing for
newbies). Should help most users with readability of text being
edited.

-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)