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