So, a couple of things about template collapsing:
1. This will only be available as an experimental feature for a while
while we experiment with its usefulness/usability/etc
2. You're dead on with the readability being harmed by simply blindly
collapsing all templates. There's a definite need for some templates to
be displayed in collapsed form with a name other than the template name.
For instance, infoboxes should be titled based on what they're about...
a little box that says [Barack Obama] or [Infobox: Barack Obama] is way
more helpful than [Infobox].
The way we were planning on extending this is with the TemplateInfo
extension, so that every template could define this information, and
specify which parameter(s) should be in the display name, or just
specify that this template is to never be collapsed, etc. So yes, in the
future we'll support this more.
-Nimish
On 4/3/10 12:11 PM, Tisza Gergő wrote:
The soon-to-come third version of the usability
extension, Citron, will be able
to collapse templates in the edit window:
http://usability.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Updated_Citron_templa…
The problem with this approach is that sometimes collapsing is harmful to the
readability of the wikitext. For example, huwiki has a template which looks like
this: "Water is generally thought to be wet, {{citation needed|text=though some
argue it is actually dry}}." That is, it can be used to select a specific part
of the text and mark it as problematic. There are many similar templates which
annotate a section of the text without breaking its flow; of you collapse the
template, the text becomes much harder to read.
The reason I'm asking about this is that we're just about to reorganize some
template parameter naming conventions, and would like to consider future
compatibility with Citron, and the only solution to the above problem I can
think of is to have a whitelist of template parameter names whose values will be
visible even in a collapsed state. (Being able to define such parameters with
per-template settings would be more flexible, but I suppose it is very expensive
to do so.) So, is there a chance Citron will have such a feature in the future
and there is value in giving all such parameters a common, distinctive,
non-numeric name?
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