After writing some articles on animals I noticed two things which I would like to discuss. I would like to know how I can help to improve them.
1) wikipedia seems to duplicate a lot of information which could be avoided. 2) there currently seems to be no way to change information in more than one article at once.
I would like to give a few examples to illustrate this:
Ad 1: Most articles on animals use some kind of table, which is duplicated for each article. Also, many articles may use the same references which are duplicated on many pages. This is seen in a lot of other articles too and is a huge waste of hard disk space and performance.
Ad 2: when I write many articles about closely related species, I may use one article as a template and copy parts of it. If I discover a typo in this copied part, I have to change it for each article by hand. Another example would be if we decide to change the background colour of the table used by most articles on animals. This may be no problem for a few articles, yet with hundreds or thousands of articles it is a huge waste of human resources.
The solution would probably be to use meta data. I tried to discuss this on wikipedia, but the discussion was moved to feature requests. An argument against the use of meta data and templates was that it would make it harder to contribute to wikipedia. An Argument which I do not really understand.
So my real questions are: who is currently working on the database schema for wikipedia and who decides if it would be useful to change this schema?
Cheers,
Jurriaan