On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Brion Vibber<brion(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: In addition to changing the programming language that is used in the template namespace a lot of progress can be made on the readability of articles (and thus how usable they are) by rethinking how we invoke templates, or rather how we make data available to templates. If you look at the George W. Bush article you see that the first 50 lines of the article are template code and that his birthday is declared multiple times like so: |birth_date={{birth date and age|mf=yes|1946|7|6}} born July 6, 1946 |DATE OF BIRTH=July 6, 1946 Editors clearly need a better system for declaring facts about articles and then using them in advanced template programming. One can imagine an alternate system where his birthday is only declared once, like so, in the article text: born on [[birthday::July 6, 1946]]. And so on for all the other facts listed in his infobox. Rather than declaring them explicitly in the infobox, you declare them explicitly inline in the text in a highly readable format. Then there is the issue of calling templates. Where do you place them within the article? Much like MediaWiki itself I suggest we introduce the notion of hooks. Beginning of article, end of article. Beginning of section, end of section. Beginning of paragraph end of paragraph. Template programmers can use these hooks to inject data that is declared explicitly in the article into various points of the article. This can be thought of as a separation of content and presentation. Articles have the constraint that their source code must, under all circumstances, be highly readable to our visitors. That way our visitors might become encyclopedia writers! Associated with those articles is another page where users can control higher level organizations of the content in the body of text. They can format it in infobox style, process it any way they like using our new programming language, and place it in a variety of locations throughout the article without sacrificing the readability of the wikitext at all. It will take a little bit more conceptual work to handle all cases, such as inline references, etc.., etc... But the bottom line is that the source code to articles on Wikipedia has become so complicated that it is now too difficult for reasonable people to consider editing. One user said that adding a new programming language to MediaWiki is totally orthogonal to the method that we use to pass data to those programs, or the context in which those programs are called. I couldn't disagree more - one of the major reasons Wikipedia is so unreadable today is because of the way we call templates from articles. From the bottom of the design to the top, it needs to be rethought. I believe that this conversation should be held far beyond wikitech-l and should be made available to subscribers of almost all of our lists and also the large pool of contributors. One of the reasons that we ended up with ParserFunctions is that very few people were involved in the conversation. Do we even understand the problem that needs to be solved? I am not convinced that it has been adequately characterized.