Not sure why I said "English Wikipedia" - but I mean all Foundation sites of
course :)
On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 10:43 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)colorado.edu> wrote:
Mark,
Keep in mind regarding my Semantic drum beating that I am not a developer
of Semantic Mediawiki or Semantic Forms. I am just a user, and as Erik put
it, an advocate.
That said, I believe these two extensions together solve the problem you
are talking about. And for whatever reason, the developers of MediaWiki are
willing to create new complicated syntax, but not new interfaces.
In your assessment, do these extensions solve the interface extensibility
problem you describe?
To the list,
Regarding development process, why weren't a variety of sophisticated
solutions, in addition to ParserFunctions, thoroughly considered before they
were enabled on the English Wikipedia?
Should ParserFunctions be reverted (a simple procedure by my estimate,
which is a good thing) based solely on the fact that they are the most clear
violation of Jimbo's principle that I am aware of?
The fundamental issue is that in complex domains (like "writing an
encyclopedia"), you can't fully analyze
and understand the domain ahead
of time, use that understanding to provide an easy-to-use
domain-specific language or interface, and then be done. So for
Wikipedia, it's virtually impossible to provide a built-in set of simple
formatting features (a person infobox, a map-dot-placement feature,
etc.) that are both easy to use and cover all situations. Domains
change, understanding of domains changes, new issues come up, and *users
need some way to develop their structures and representations as they're
being used.* If you *don't* allow that, what ends up happening is that
people keep using the simple features you've provided, but in more and
more convoluted ways to try to force the system to do what they want.