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(a)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(a)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.
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Aaron Gray
Independent Open Source Software Engineer, Computer Language Researcher,
Information Theorist, and amateur computer scientist.