> > We need to find the right balance between making editing easy and
> > making reading Wikipedia unobtrusive. Some work on this is being
done
> > in the Skin department, for example, where we will probably end up
> > with a Skin preferred by editors, and one that is more friendly to
> > non-editing users.
> This would be a terrible violation of the basic Wiki-nature of
Wikipedia.
No it wouldn't. Anybody can use any skin they want! The idea is only
to give people tools optimized for use. Readers and casual editors
don't want confusing and redundant links. Long time editors don't mind
trading increased learning curve for more functionality, and the
potential to do what they want with one or two less clicks.
Making wikipedia easier to use for everybody isn't a terrible violation
of basic wiki-nature, it's just being nice to users. And, that -- in my
opinion -- is a just a good idea.
--Mark Christensen
It's been oft complained that it's difficult to link to various special
functions -- backlinks, contribs, and the like -- which might be nice. I
made a quick hack to allow tacking a parameter onto a special page in a
wikilink, like so:
[[Special:Contributions/User name]]
[[Special:Whatlinkshere/Page title]]
[[Special:Recentchangeslinked/Page title]]
etc
See some examples and try it out at on the test wiki at
http://test.wikipedia.org/
The slash (/) doesn't have to be the separator character; if people find
it offensive I'm sure we could change it to something else. :) A(nother)
colon may or may not be preferable.
An advantage that a variant on this scheme has over the experimental
interwiki prefixes Erik put in a bit ago ([[BackLinks:foo]] etc) is that
it will require no additional per-wiki maintenance, and can be used
across existing interwiki links (once set up on the live wikis), eg:
[[DeWikipedia:Spezial:Contributions/Eloquence]] would work from English
Wikipedia, or even from other unrelated wikis so long as they support
the DeWikipedia prefix.*
A disadvantage (so far) is that since history & editing don't go through
special pages, they'll need a little more work to set up on a similar
scheme.
(Technical notes please follow up to wikitech-l. Policy & usability
notes please follow up to wikipedia-l.)
*On a somewhat related note, it may be useful to set up a redirector
such that other wikis don't have to set up a billion separate interwiki
prefixes to link to Wikipedia. eg, a link to:
[[WikiPedia:pl:Medycyna]]
would typically end up at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/pl:Medycyna
That could never be an article on English wikipedia, since internal
links would take the pl: to be an interlanguage prefix, and it's
rejected as a bad title. So why not redirect? So, to reiterate our
example with this possibility we might link:
[[WikiPedia:de:Spezial:Contributions/Eloquence]]
on any wiki supporting the WikiPedia interwiki prefix, with no need to
bug site owners to extend their prefix list for other languages. Too
many pieces? Maybe. :) But probably easier to type than
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Spezial:Contribtutions&target=El…
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
>From: Daniel Mayer
>brion vibber wrote:
> >...you had to make an anchor
> >yourself by putting in some HTML tag with
> >an 'id="anchorname"' attribute.
>
>Sounds cool. But why not just make another article?
Because that'd make some permanent one-paragraph or one-sentence stubs on
things humankind know little about. Some articles I made refers to another
parts of sections of its own or other articles.
> >...automatically _create_ anchors from headers...
>
>Heavens no! That would be ugly and non-standard and should not be a default
>setting (in the same way as the almost as ugly auto header numbering is not
>the default).
It doesn't have to be default at all, as apparent from the Korean NoSmoke
WikiForum, for example, on my page ( http://no-smok.net/nsmk/Menchi ), I
used several levels of headers, but the index can _only_ be revealled by the
markup, [[TableOfContents]].
Menchi Zh-En
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