On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 10:26:59PM -0700, Zoe wrote:
Can someone please explain what we're talking about here? I am totally confused. Are we talking about inventing some sort of new language to create country codes? If not, just what ARE we talking about? I'm so confused, I dont't think I'd ever use whatever it is we're talking about.
Hello Zoe,
Wikipedia normally uses an easy markup language. It uses ''' to make things bold or == for headings. After a user has hit the 'edit'-button for the first time, he gets an idea of how to fix an article very fast. The learning curve is rather flat.
For some articles, we use those nice tables. E.g. http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Beryllium&action=edit It starts like this:
[[de:Beryllium]][[eo:Berilo]][[nl:beryllium]][[pl:Beryl]][[fr:B�ryllium]] <table border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="0" align="right"> <tr><td colspan="2" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"> <table align="center" border="0"> <tr><td colspan="2" align="center">[[Lithium]] - '''Beryllium''' - [[Boron]]</td> </tr> <tr><td rowspan="3" valign="center"> <br>'''Be'''<br>[[Magnesium|Mg]] <br> <br> </td></tr> <tr><td align="center">[[image:Be-TableImage.png|Click for description]]<br> [[Periodic table/Standard Table|Full table]]</td></tr> </table> </td></tr>
Those articles are not easy to edit. They are frightening.
Lee proposed a new syntax for tables, similar to what some other wiki engines already provide. It was rather easy to read and to understand. He provided some extensions to add color and such to the tables. Not that simple any- more but OK. But: The new syntax for tables wasn't power- full enough to generate the Beryllium-table. It might have been OK for Countryboxes, though.
Some others proposed: Take the tables into a different article (in a seperate namespace) and include them like an image is included. On first sight, an editor would just see pretty Wiki markup and a link [[Table:Beryllium]]. He would have to click on a new button to edit the table.
Two things I didn't like about this: - The article's content should be in the article, not distributed to several places. - A lot of duplication will be done. All Countryboxes are identical except for the content. "Write it once, use it multiple times" is a principle to increase efficiency.
My proposal in short: - The ugly HTML-code for tables will be banned from the article-namespace. - HTML will be written to pages in a seperate namespace. - Those pages will be parametrizable. So a table can be layouted once and used multiple times. - They are included into the article by some simple syntax assigning text to the parameters.
The concept is not only useable for tables but for other text blocks, too: Copyright infringement notices, images, "I am not a lawyer/doctor"-Warnings, etc: [[Include:IANAL]] or [[Include:Copyright infringement|URL=http://where.he.got.it.from/]]
It's not about country codes. This is just an example to illustrate what we are thinking about. In this mail, I used the Beryllium-table as an example.
I hope I summarized the thread correctly.
Best regards,
JeLuF