Thank you please keep suggestions and pragmatics coming in !
I looked at this problem some time ago and the extra programming for what I am proposing is quite minimal utilizing existing MediaWiki libraries and adding extra code to support the tag structure with defaulting to make it seamless to existing articles.
I really think this would increase the usability and audience of Wikipedia and also might possibly allow us to integrate content from other Wikipedia projects.
Regards,
Aaron
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019 at 07:57, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
The suggestions that bring up the Simple English Wikipedia miss the fact that it only covers the English language, which most people don't know, and doesn't do almost anything for the many other languages of the world. (I'm saying "almost anything" because I know that there are people who prefer to translate articles from the Simple English Wikipedia, and this indirectly benefits other languages.)
One thing about how Wikipedia works that practically no-one ever challenges is that every page title is associated with a page, and the page is always a single big blob of sections, section headings, templates and magic words.
What if it was not a single blob?
What if all the magic words, such as NOTOC, DISPLAYTITLE, and DEFAULTSORT moved to a separate metadata storage?
More closely to this thread's topic, what if at least some sections that all or most pages have were stored separately, so that it would be possible to parse and render them semantically? The References section, for example, is something that many pages have. What if it could be separated from the prose blob and stored separately, so that it would be parsed semantically for different screens and contexts, such as Wikicite? Currently its rendering and storage is heavily biased for desktop and wiki syntax editing, and suboptimal for mobile display and editing, as well as for translation.
And most closely to the thread's original topic, what if one page could have several lead sections? Sure, this can be done now with hacks such as templates and namespaces, but these are still hacks: they are not semantic, not portable across languages, and not easily machine-readable.
Of course, doing all these things would require major, major changes in how Wikipedia's software works. Developers would have to write a lot of code and editors would have to get used to new things. But sometimes it's worth thinking our of the box instead of saying "that's not how Wikipedia works".
בתאריך שבת, 9 בפבר׳ 2019, 02:16, מאת Aaron Gray < aaronngray.lists@gmail.com
:
I am suggesting WikiPedia has context-sensitive articles so if you are a kid or a layperson or an expert in a field you get a different introduction.
Often the reason people don't read or use WikiPedia is articles are too complex at the start.
Having an adaptive setting that can be chosen but users as default needs facilitating by WikiMedia technology.
Thoughts and ideas and possible implementation ideas on this idea are welcomed.
Regards,
Aaron
-- Aaron Gray
Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language Researcher, Information Theorist, and amateur computer scientist. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
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