On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 7:42 PM, Juliano F. Ravasi ml@juliano.info wrote:
Instead of opening a tag and dumping graph/timeline code in the article, we have a namespace where articles are parsed as graph/timeline code (some extra syntax needed in order to put some wikitext in the same article). Then, in article pages, you insert a link like [[Graph:Graph title|options|description]] or [[Timeline:Timeline title|...]], and they are inserted just like images are.
This has a few advantages:
- Graphs or timelines (or music scores) that appear in multiple pages
are maintained in a single central article, changes in it propagates to all pages that include that object, just like it is with images;
- It becomes easier to edit article pages, because you have only
wikitext to look at, and not a mix of wikitext, dot syntax, timeline syntax, etc...
- Perfect garbage collection: we produce no garbage. In-disk files are
linked to special article pages; if someone deletes the article, MW just wipes all files with that given hash and you are done. Any file without a matching article in that special namespace is easily marked as garbage.
You could also apply this to SVG graphics to allow on-line editing of them. But everything we discuss here has as basic requirement a common image storage mechanism, which should be implemented before anything else.
Marco