On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 02:28:07PM +1000, Steve Bennett wrote:
Will those be extensible, as category pages are? Based on the disambigs *I've* seen, assuming you can *do* that automatically may not be all that safe.
In what way are category pages extensible? You mean in the brief text at the top? I was envisageing automatic (probably better called dynamic) disambiguation pages as being completely generated on the fly. If you wanted to tweak something, you would replace it by a real disambiguation page. There are problems with this proposal.
This actually presents a few complexities, as links themselves are stored in
a links table, and would have to be updated if the aliases change. It's
also
not clear whether the third case above should be a red or blue link.
How is that handled with :Category:?
I'm not sure what analogy you're making exactly, but an interesting, weird and possibly relevant thing does happen with categories: linking to a category which contains articles, but does not itself exist as a "page" shows as a red, but functional link.
Yep, that was what I was talking about. It's red unless someone's made it "actually be a page" by putting content on it... even if there are items there which you will see when you click the redlink.
Weirded me out the first time I noticed it.
Some other issues that also occur to me:
- does template transclusion work on an alias? If not, why not?
Would it work on a redirect? If so, why shouldn't it work on an alias?
Yeah, there's no problem transcluding {{clr}} which redirects to {{-}}. Why not? Perhaps because the potential for damage (malicious or otherwise) is greater.
Yeah; there are *lots* of potential pitfalls, aren't there?
Such was my instinct, yes. Takes me a while to back up those instincts, sometimes, though...
Are they design? Or merely implementation? Given that they don't seem to be problems for redirects, I suspect they're implementation.
Is there a way to get the good parts of this idea while sticking with redirects as the actual implementation?
I'll put my thinking cap on. There's a bit of a problem in terms of trying to make whatever feature "fit in" with the existing MediaWiki feature set and general look and feel, behaviour etc. Is it ok to break that by using lots of javascript to list and edit redirects? Is it ok to write to a page other than the one the user is looking at? Is it ok to pop open a new window to facilitate the user editing multiple pages at once? Is it ok to generate code for a disambiguation page and ask the user to review it?
My instinct on this one is "Installed Base". The basic structure of MW is well known on a sufficiently wide scale that fundamental changes to it -- which I feel this is -- merit fairly deep study.
Cheers, -- jra