On Fri, Sep 25, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.comwrote:
2009/9/25 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
- This will fundamentally change mediawiki and the consequences of this
feature have not been considered
- It will support the creation of new interfaces from interfaces, simply
by
creating templates that create new templates and using the interface to
that
template to create the new interface. Is this correct?
Wait, what? Can you explain this better or provide an example?
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
Roan, sorry that the idea is pretty hard to convey, I'll try again. The basic idea is that you can create templates using templates (just using current tech). It's easy, you just pass parameters to a template that control its output, and this output is a new template. The parameters that you passed determine what the new template looks like, and what it's output will be.
We can imagine a master template on Wikipedia that is used to generate all infoboxes. It could work in arbitrary ways, but suppose it works this way: The master infobox template creates a template for each wikiproject. The template that it creates for each wikiproject further creates templates representing every kind of infobox that this wikiproject uses. So you have a master template that creates baby templates that create infobox templates.
Using current tech this isn't exactly feasible, only advanced users will do it since you have to directly interact with the templates and it would be tough to code up. But if you make such a feature highly usable, by, for example, tacking an easy to use interface on top of it, the usage of such techniques will proliferate.
More general kinds of interface builders that build all imaginable kinds of interfaces are conceivable.
Is this not possible within the scope of the suggested system?