Peter adds:
My challenge to PS/FBI - Pre Structured / Form Based
Input is the PRE
part of it - all future, subsequent input must be PRE-thought of by
someone else, first. So, if I want to do something new, what do I do,
apply for a new permit from the programmers so they can build a
pre-structured input form for my nascent idea?
I completely agree with you Peter that we want to make it easy to enter
information and maintain flexibility but PS/FBI (I need to go to an Acronyms
Anonymous meeting...) would only apply to templates and not the whole wiki
page. Templates by their very nature are PRE-thought out and structured by
someone else already, I'm not suggesting anything new there. However, before I
learned about templates, I was very confused when looking at the wiki-text and
had no idea how to edit template input. As for getting permits, if a user
wants to include a new item in a template, don't you have to go to the
template builder to add it today?
BTW, I am suggesting an extension that would automagically build forms from
templates (preferably named-templates for form labels) so that no programmer
would be required.
We're not doing data entry in a checking account
register. We're trying
to build an inclusive community, seeking contribution of, and a
repository for, the world's knowledge, freely shared - and that means
massive amounts of unprecedented INPUT, as well as OUTPUT.
My point here is more about separating the content from presentation. If
color, bold or italicized text is part of the content, then by all means let
the user add it with WYSIWYG or IPE but if you let any user add formatting to
the content, you'll have wiki-champions spending all of their time removing
formatting to remove inconsistent markup. We're here to freely share
contributions of knowledge and content and not font preferences.
To be honest, I much more in favor of IPE with the assistance of template
forms than WYSIWYG. I'm not suggesting a check register motif but rather
something like the "microformatting"[1] of the wiki.
Best,
Mark W.
1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microformats