The Mediawiki software, the wiki syntax and the Wiki interface is in desperate need of a few people with some knowledge on user interfaces and semantics who can make useful suggestions on enhancing it. That won't be easy, as the wiki syntax was built in a very organic way, without a lot of standardization or good thought on how it will work in the future. This had the benefit that the projects could grow very fast, but the problems are showing right now.
WYSIWYG editors are not the solution because, as Delphine pointed out, they don't magically add semantic meaning to text, they just make it look pretty. What is really needed is a standard on what wikitext is, what wikitext isn't and what wikitext will be in the future. HTML has gone through the same process, and i believe we are on the same stage right now as when people were beginning to think that the <blink> tag was a bad thing.
So, something like a specification for MediaWiki wikitext should be agreed upon (in a text document, not in the MediaWiki PHP code). After that, on a solid foundation, nice gadgets can be built to help people built tables and templates.
-- Hay / Husky
On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 1:03 AM, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 9:14 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
2008/9/25 geni geniice@gmail.com:
2008/9/25 phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com:
I was going to say as well, what happened to that proposal to define references at the bottom of the article instead of inline? And then Pathos posted a nice implementation above. It does make a whole lot more sense from both a reader and an editor's point of view to have reference metadata in a single place, away from the wikitext. Defining refs with a "refname" in the text doesn't seem too bad... other than the mess of trying to get a different stylistic system going, is there some reason we don't do this?
-- phoebe
Basically it results in a high maintenance cost with a fairly high chance of errors. It means you have to keep the article text and the end section in sync rather than just keeping all the stuff in one place.
If a reference is used more than once, it's not all in one place anyway. It actually solves the issue of someone accidentally deleting the text for the ref not realising it is used elsewhere. For refs only used once, it makes maintenance of the ref a little harder, but maintenance of the rest of the article much easier.
And arguably it would make it easier, not harder, if you had several similar refs, to correct any errors in all of your references at once, see irregularities, etc.
-- phoebe
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