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

[Gwern Branwen]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:
> One of the reasons everyone and their sockpuppet scream "WYSIWYG
>  editor" is the accumulation of intricate wiki markup on even otherwise
>  simple pages. Coincidentally, this is also what prevents a WYSIWYG
>  editor at the moment ;-)
>  It is also said that the template hell and other things scare away
>  newbies, or lead to their accidental breaking of pages.
>
>  Once Upon A Time (TM), I wrote a function into MediaWiki that would
>  separate some of the meta content into a separate editing area, thus
>  reducing the clutter in the actual edit box. The code's still there,
>  deactivated, and probably broken right now.
>
>  Today, I rewrote the thing in JavaScript. It separates
>  * templates, images, and horizontal lines at the top of a page
>  * templates and some magic words at the end of a page
>  * categories
>  * language links
>  into text boxes of their own. This happens automatically right after
>  loading the edit page, and it all gets reconstructed into a single
>  text the moment you save, preview, or diff the edit. On preview or
>  diff, everything gets separated again.
>
>  It is only enabled for the article namespace. Top and bottom edit
>  boxes can be hidden (I could add an option to hide either as default),
>  and everything can be reset to "standard", giving the normal edit page
>  for the moment.
...
>  Cheers,
>  Magnus

I'm using it now. I really like it, but after a few minutes a few
things strike me:

# How about a box for External links sections? It makes quite as much
sense as one for References or headers.
# When there's nothing for a particular section, it would be great if
your script could collapse the box until opened; and then if you add
stuff into it, it could insert it into the article with the
appropriate header in the appropriate place. That would be neat.

--
gwern