On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 4:00 AM, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 7:01 PM, Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
Any plans of separating these on edit, then re-attach them to the text on saving? It's low-hanging fruit IMHO.
Good question. IMHO, all position independent stuff (ie, metadata) would be better off saved separately, and edited separately. As a legacy solution, users could still type [[Category:Blah]] in the main edit box, but at save time, it would be moved to the metadata area.
I agree that all this should be stored separately; however, that would mean a (major) rewrite of things (least of all the dumping process) and thinking (e.g. the category table suddenly becomes the authoritative storage for that data, not the wikitext). I was thinking about a quickly implemented solution that could simulate these effects for the user without major code revisions.
References are another example of location-independent metadata that should be dealt with like that. But honestly, the Usability people seem to be doing a pretty good and know what they're doing. Do they need more ideas from us?
Yes, they do a pretty good job; that doesn't mean they have all the answers (who has? except me of course!:-) or all the ideas. At the very least, publicly mentioning our ideas can re-enforce their decision to implement it.
Cheers, Magnus