As I've been working on my Disinfopedia, a couple of things have come up that I thought I'd share:
(1) I've decided to use the Wikipedia interface as-is, except that I've inserted a navigation bar at the top with some local links to the rest of our PR Watch web site. This means that I've had to insert a line of code into Skin.php, SkinNostalgia.php, and SkinCologneBlue.php. The line reads as follows:
$s .= wfMsg( "navbar" );
In Skin.php, I put this line just before the line that says
$s .= $this->topLinks();
The actual text and HTML for the navbar appears in Language.php, where I inserted a definition of "navbar" in the $wgAllMessagesEn array.
Would it be possible to insert my line of code into Wikipedia's "official" version of pages Skin.php, SkinNostalgia.php and SkinCologneBlue.php, along with a definition of "navbar" as a null string in Language.php? This would make it a little easier for me to keep my copy of the scripts harmonized with future revisions. Also, the "navbar" might provide a useful hook to other people who want to customize the interface.
(2) For the time being, I'm abandoning my original idea of having separate input templates for different types of articles (e.g., articles about people, organizations, etc.). However, I've given a little more thought to the idea of adding object-typing and structure, and I wonder if perhaps this could be done through some additions to the Wiki syntax. Perhaps "::" could be used to specify an object TYPE, and "->" could be used to specify an object PROPERTY. Examples:
[[person::Abraham Lincoln]]
[[employee->Archie Bunker]]
In addition, each Wikipedia article could be considered a de facto object definition, with some syntax that enables explicit specification of object properties and superclasses. For example, you might have an article about "person" which includes the following code:
[[property->date_of_birth]] [[property->gender]]
A separate article about "Nobel Prize winner" might include the following text:
[[superclass->person]] [[property->year_of_award]] [[property->award_category]]
These definitions wouldn't appear in the display versions of articles, but they could be useful in other ways, e.g., customizing the input templates for new articles or data mining. For example, an article about Albert Einstein might include text which says:
[[object_type->Nobel_Prize_winner]] '''Albert Einstein''' (born [[date_of_birth->March 14, 1879]]), was a [[physicist]] who first proposed the [[theory of relativity]]. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in [[year_of_award->1921]]. Notwithstanding his personal pacifism, he supported the scientific research that led to the development of the [[weapon_of_mass_destruction::atom bomb]].
Finally, perhaps there could also be some sort of syntax for automatically inserting a list of all objects of a given type. For example, the bottom of the article titled "Nobel Prize winner" could have a line at the bottom that lists all articles with this object type, sorted by year of award.
What do you think? Is there any merit to these ideas? I'm still a Wikipedia newbie, so I apologize if this all seems half-baked.