On 8/7/06, Simetrical Simetrical+wikitech@gmail.com wrote:
Is there any particular reason to add to the wikimarkup an average editor has to encounter, however slightly?
Whenever beneficial, yep.
Some (fairly minor) benefits: *You could easily compile a list of all ISBNs referred to on WP (god knows what you'd do with it) *If we implemented similar templates, like ASIN's (amazon) or something, the syntax would be the same. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumner_Welles for an example of a page that mixes ISBN's (which work) with ASIN's (which do nothing) *From the same page, text like this would actually work: "ISBN 0312174403 / 0-312-17440-3". It's actually a good example of where an {{ISBN}} template would actually be useful: you could make that second number a link, which currently it isn't, because it's not directly preceded by the magic word. * The syntax of MediaWiki would be reduced that little bit more, making compatibility with other wiki's easier, and making parsing it easier. Again, pretty minor considering that there's no huge loss for any wiki that doesn't support magic ISBN's - but if we implemented them as templates, they'd get them for free. * With parser functions, we could actually attempt to validate the ISBN's rather than passing them blindly. According to [[:en:International Standard Book Number]], they should be either 10 or 13 digits long, and have a checksum. Our magic word accepts "1" as a "valid" ISBN.
Basically, all the logic about ISBN's is apparently hardcoded into MediaWiki, which is a pretty awful place for it, when you think about it. It's pretty doubtful that if someone requested on this mailing list today for this functionality to be implemented, that that request would be granted.
I do acknowledge the triviality of this issue, though.
Steve