On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 10:01 PM, Dan Garry dgarry@wikimedia.org wrote:
My takeaway from this was that there are strong arguments both for and against keeping the representation of an article as a single blob of wikitext/HTML.
In the Architecture focus discussion, Krinkle, tgr, and others expressed a more optimistic idea, that the wikitext of an article is "a sea of prose with isles of non-prose content, which could come from structured data" [1].
I wasn't properly aware that the <graph> [2] and <templatedata> [3] parser tags are examples of this already. Their content is highly structured and VisualEditor or dedicated code can provide a specialized editor for it. If you edit source of a wiki page containing them and garble their content, you get a syntax warning or fail.
Wiki pages need more of these, <drumroll> Structure Content Blobs™ (or sPage Components? anything but "widget"). Are they necessarily parser tags, or is a parser function like {{#graph: *some parameters*}} equivalent?
To be concrete, does this mean the way forward for specifying lead images [5] is a parser tag <leadimage>{ "imagepage": "File:Einstein_1921_by_F_Schmutzer_-_restoration.jpg", "focalarea": {"rect": [0.20, 0.20, 0.12, 0.12]} } </leadimage> in wikitext, with a MediaWiki API to add this to a document and a WYSIWYG property editor in VisualEditor for humans?
AIUI, the *Architecture focus 2015* document discusses this under "Generalized transclusion" [4] and comments: Over the next months, the MediaWiki developer community and staff should investigate how the different transclusion mechanism used with wikitext content can be unified and extended to work with non-wikitext content.
Exciting stuff.
[1] https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2015/wikimedia-office.201... starting at 21:21:05 [2] e.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo/Map?action=edit [3] e.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Phabricator?action=edit [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_focus_2015#General_architectural... [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91683