What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing?
Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself? If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned something useful from another one?
Lars Aronsson hett schreven:
What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing?
Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself? If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned something useful from another one?
As you are speaking of infoboxes and crosswiki, I want to chip in another thought: why do we actually place infobox templates on every single wiki? In 2007 I created some semiautomatic bot articles about municipalities on my home wiki. In 2008 they had elections and elected new mayors. So my articles mentioning the mayors were outdated. The articles in the main language of that country were updated relatively quickly, Mine are not yet. I plan to do, but who does that for all articles in all language editions?
An example: Bavaria held communal elections in March 2008. Enough time to update infoboxes. The municipality Adelzhausen got Lorenz Braun as new mayor, replacing Thomas Goldstein. I checked all interwikis of the German article. Two had it right. Both were created after the elections. Four don't mention the mayor at all, and six still mentioned the old mayor. No wiki had bothered to update the information.
It would be much easier, if we had a central repository for the data. We would place infoboxes in the central wiki. Each wiki then could fetch the data from the central wiki just as images are fetched from Commons and render the data into a localised infobox. That would be much more accurate than maintaining redundant info on potentially hundreds of wikis.
Marcus Buck
PS: And that would be interesting in regard to "botopedias" too. Volapük Wikipedia was massively critized for creating masses of bot content. With a central wiki for data creating articles for example for all the ~37,000 municipalities of France would essentially be reduced to creating a template that renders the central content into an article. Little Wikipedias could greatly benefit, if they just had to create some templates to make available info on hundreds of thousands of topics to the speakers of their language. It would be very basic, infobox-like information, but it would be information.
Step 1 would be making interwiki transclusion not suck. Its been a long-standing back-burner project of mine.
-Chad
On Feb 2, 2009 8:05 PM, "Marcus Buck" wiki@marcusbuck.org wrote:
Lars Aronsson hett schreven:
What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic >
places, the one used on the F... As you are speaking of infoboxes and crosswiki, I want to chip in another thought: why do we actually place infobox templates on every single wiki? In 2007 I created some semiautomatic bot articles about municipalities on my home wiki. In 2008 they had elections and elected new mayors. So my articles mentioning the mayors were outdated. The articles in the main language of that country were updated relatively quickly, Mine are not yet. I plan to do, but who does that for all articles in all language editions?
An example: Bavaria held communal elections in March 2008. Enough time to update infoboxes. The municipality Adelzhausen got Lorenz Braun as new mayor, replacing Thomas Goldstein. I checked all interwikis of the German article. Two had it right. Both were created after the elections. Four don't mention the mayor at all, and six still mentioned the old mayor. No wiki had bothered to update the information.
It would be much easier, if we had a central repository for the data. We would place infoboxes in the central wiki. Each wiki then could fetch the data from the central wiki just as images are fetched from Commons and render the data into a localised infobox. That would be much more accurate than maintaining redundant info on potentially hundreds of wikis.
Marcus Buck
PS: And that would be interesting in regard to "botopedias" too. Volapük Wikipedia was massively critized for creating masses of bot content. With a central wiki for data creating articles for example for all the ~37,000 municipalities of France would essentially be reduced to creating a template that renders the central content into an article. Little Wikipedias could greatly benefit, if they just had to create some templates to make available info on hundreds of thousands of topics to the speakers of their language. It would be very basic, infobox-like information, but it would be information.
_______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia....
We really need a wikidata type site. We ran into similar issues with structured data between government data wikis. Yaron hacked up a (relatively simple) extension called External Data for pulling external data into a given page.
This ends up working very well, allowing us to effortlessly transclude shared datasets into templates of multiple wikis. This is fundamentally good as it moves queriable maintained structured data away from multiple instances of user maintained semi-structured data.
For the wikimedia context I think something like wikidata.wikimedia.org needs to be created. It could be a semanticMediaWiki wiki installation extended with localized page aliases. A single page-id or "concept" would have many title columns for each language. (The localized title columns can be propagated by the existing database of inter-wiki language links). Furthermore since "properties/relations" have titles/"page-ids"; they could also be localized. Allowing you to query the shared structured dataset in your local language.
Then something like external data extension will tie wikidata to all the current language wikis. This can be thought of as commons but for data. (likewise external to wikimedia wikis could use this structured data). This lets template authors concentrate on localized representation of the data (calling the native language properties) , articles authors can focus on the article (instead of huge seed of hard to maintain template data), and structured data folks can focus on importing data into the central shared repository.
--michael
Marcus Buck wrote:
Lars Aronsson hett schreven:
What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing?
Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself? If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned something useful from another one?
As you are speaking of infoboxes and crosswiki, I want to chip in another thought: why do we actually place infobox templates on every single wiki? In 2007 I created some semiautomatic bot articles about municipalities on my home wiki. In 2008 they had elections and elected new mayors. So my articles mentioning the mayors were outdated. The articles in the main language of that country were updated relatively quickly, Mine are not yet. I plan to do, but who does that for all articles in all language editions?
An example: Bavaria held communal elections in March 2008. Enough time to update infoboxes. The municipality Adelzhausen got Lorenz Braun as new mayor, replacing Thomas Goldstein. I checked all interwikis of the German article. Two had it right. Both were created after the elections. Four don't mention the mayor at all, and six still mentioned the old mayor. No wiki had bothered to update the information.
It would be much easier, if we had a central repository for the data. We would place infoboxes in the central wiki. Each wiki then could fetch the data from the central wiki just as images are fetched from Commons and render the data into a localised infobox. That would be much more accurate than maintaining redundant info on potentially hundreds of wikis.
Marcus Buck
PS: And that would be interesting in regard to "botopedias" too. Volapük Wikipedia was massively critized for creating masses of bot content. With a central wiki for data creating articles for example for all the ~37,000 municipalities of France would essentially be reduced to creating a template that renders the central content into an article. Little Wikipedias could greatly benefit, if they just had to create some templates to make available info on hundreds of thousands of topics to the speakers of their language. It would be very basic, infobox-like information, but it would be information.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Hoi, Have a look at this: http://www.omegawiki.org/Expression:Nederland This is structured data It can be shown in multiple languages. It does allow for interwiki links... It already works with MediaWiki ...
So the question is, why re-invent the wheel ? Thanks, GerardM
2009/2/3 Michael Dale mdale@wikimedia.org
We really need a wikidata type site. We ran into similar issues with structured data between government data wikis. Yaron hacked up a (relatively simple) extension called External Data for pulling external data into a given page.
This ends up working very well, allowing us to effortlessly transclude shared datasets into templates of multiple wikis. This is fundamentally good as it moves queriable maintained structured data away from multiple instances of user maintained semi-structured data.
For the wikimedia context I think something like wikidata.wikimedia.org needs to be created. It could be a semanticMediaWiki wiki installation extended with localized page aliases. A single page-id or "concept" would have many title columns for each language. (The localized title columns can be propagated by the existing database of inter-wiki language links). Furthermore since "properties/relations" have titles/"page-ids"; they could also be localized. Allowing you to query the shared structured dataset in your local language.
Then something like external data extension will tie wikidata to all the current language wikis. This can be thought of as commons but for data. (likewise external to wikimedia wikis could use this structured data). This lets template authors concentrate on localized representation of the data (calling the native language properties) , articles authors can focus on the article (instead of huge seed of hard to maintain template data), and structured data folks can focus on importing data into the central shared repository.
--michael
Marcus Buck wrote:
Lars Aronsson hett schreven:
What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing?
Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself? If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned something useful from another one?
As you are speaking of infoboxes and crosswiki, I want to chip in another thought: why do we actually place infobox templates on every single wiki? In 2007 I created some semiautomatic bot articles about municipalities on my home wiki. In 2008 they had elections and elected new mayors. So my articles mentioning the mayors were outdated. The articles in the main language of that country were updated relatively quickly, Mine are not yet. I plan to do, but who does that for all articles in all language editions?
An example: Bavaria held communal elections in March 2008. Enough time to update infoboxes. The municipality Adelzhausen got Lorenz Braun as new mayor, replacing Thomas Goldstein. I checked all interwikis of the German article. Two had it right. Both were created after the elections. Four don't mention the mayor at all, and six still mentioned the old mayor. No wiki had bothered to update the information.
It would be much easier, if we had a central repository for the data. We would place infoboxes in the central wiki. Each wiki then could fetch the data from the central wiki just as images are fetched from Commons and render the data into a localised infobox. That would be much more accurate than maintaining redundant info on potentially hundreds of
wikis.
Marcus Buck
PS: And that would be interesting in regard to "botopedias" too. Volapük Wikipedia was massively critized for creating masses of bot content. With a central wiki for data creating articles for example for all the ~37,000 municipalities of France would essentially be reduced to creating a template that renders the central content into an article. Little Wikipedias could greatly benefit, if they just had to create some templates to make available info on hundreds of thousands of topics to the speakers of their language. It would be very basic, infobox-like information, but it would be information.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 12:26 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, Have a look at this: http://www.omegawiki.org/Expression:Nederland This is structured data It can be shown in multiple languages. It does allow for interwiki links... It already works with MediaWiki ...
So the question is, why re-invent the wheel ? Thanks, GerardM
2009/2/3 Michael Dale mdale@wikimedia.org
We really need a wikidata type site. We ran into similar issues with structured data between government data wikis. Yaron hacked up a (relatively simple) extension called External Data for pulling external data into a given page.
This ends up working very well, allowing us to effortlessly transclude shared datasets into templates of multiple wikis. This is fundamentally good as it moves queriable maintained structured data away from multiple instances of user maintained semi-structured data.
For the wikimedia context I think something like wikidata.wikimedia.org needs to be created. It could be a semanticMediaWiki wiki installation extended with localized page aliases. A single page-id or "concept" would have many title columns for each language. (The localized title columns can be propagated by the existing database of inter-wiki language links). Furthermore since "properties/relations" have titles/"page-ids"; they could also be localized. Allowing you to query the shared structured dataset in your local language.
Then something like external data extension will tie wikidata to all the current language wikis. This can be thought of as commons but for data. (likewise external to wikimedia wikis could use this structured data). This lets template authors concentrate on localized representation of the data (calling the native language properties) , articles authors can focus on the article (instead of huge seed of hard to maintain template data), and structured data folks can focus on importing data into the central shared repository.
--michael
I think Michael Dale said the same thing. He was just saying that perhaps we could have a central wiki (based on SMW) to hold the data, and allow the individual projects to use ExternalData to grab the data into the presentation format of their choice. Not a terrible idea, IMO :)
Combining enwiki and frwiki into one mega-pedia isn't the best idea. Each wiki should be free to not only decide content as they so choose, but also to use the presentation they prefer. However, there's no need to duplicate raw facts as mentioned, so a central wiki of the raw facts query-able by ExternalData would serve this purpose. Allow wikis to retain their autonomy, but give them access to centralized data that doesn't change in different languages.
-Chad
Gerard Meijssen hett schreven:
Hoi, Have a look at this: http://www.omegawiki.org/Expression:Nederland This is structured data It can be shown in multiple languages. It does allow for interwiki links... It already works with MediaWiki ...
So the question is, why re-invent the wheel ? Thanks, GerardM
Is it transcludable to other wikis?
Marcus Buck
Gerard Meijssen schreef:
Hoi, Have a look at this: http://www.omegawiki.org/Expression:Nederland This is structured data It can be shown in multiple languages. It does allow for interwiki links... It already works with MediaWiki ...
So the question is, why re-invent the wheel ?
I think the wheel is called Semantic MediaWiki in this case :P
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
Hoi, I really like Semantic MediaWiki. But horses for courses. SMW is great for content where articles exist within one MediaWiki installation. It is TRULY project based. OmegaWiki is data that is indeed a separate database. The reason for a separate database is exactly because you do not want to create unnecessary dependencies. This is where OmegaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki are essentially different. GerardM
2009/2/3 Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@home.nl
Gerard Meijssen schreef:
Hoi, Have a look at this: http://www.omegawiki.org/Expression:Nederland This
is
structured data It can be shown in multiple languages. It does allow for interwiki links... It already works with MediaWiki ...
So the question is, why re-invent the wheel ?
I think the wheel is called Semantic MediaWiki in this case :P
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
hmm ... my feeling is that it would be easier to adapt semantic wiki to include language aliasing than adapt omega wiki to be less dictionary centric in the context of a shared structured data site with _lossy_ defined community ontologies... But fundamentally there is no reason why an external data extension could not pull from both such external structured data systems.
to elaborate a bit... As far as I can tell OmegaWiki would have to go a long way to be used in the same way that semantic wiki is used today. And an even further way to integrate with how wikimedia uses templates and infoboxes today. Omega seems to tie relations to items in a specif defined concepts name space, rather than arbitrary wiki pages. This makes a lot of sense if designing a multi-lingual language representation system but not so ideal for a general purpose shared structured data template propagation system tied to specif article entries.
OmegaWiki is seems to be focused on multilengual language representation rather than multiple data type representation, re-usage, and template integration. Semantic wiki appears to be more of a flexible platform in this area as it has spawned dozens of extensions and hundreds of usages in a wide range of contexts.
Semantic wiki has already done a few revisions to optimize the storage and retrieval of multiple data-types, its more closely tied to the svn version of mediaWiki, they do regular releases etc.
That being said let me reiterate an external data extension could support multiple remote data systems.
--michael
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi, Have a look at this: http://www.omegawiki.org/Expression:Nederland This is structured data It can be shown in multiple languages. It does allow for interwiki links... It already works with MediaWiki ...
So the question is, why re-invent the wheel ? Thanks, GerardM
2009/2/3 Michael Dale mdale@wikimedia.org
We really need a wikidata type site. We ran into similar issues with structured data between government data wikis. Yaron hacked up a (relatively simple) extension called External Data for pulling external data into a given page.
This ends up working very well, allowing us to effortlessly transclude shared datasets into templates of multiple wikis. This is fundamentally good as it moves queriable maintained structured data away from multiple instances of user maintained semi-structured data.
For the wikimedia context I think something like wikidata.wikimedia.org needs to be created. It could be a semanticMediaWiki wiki installation extended with localized page aliases. A single page-id or "concept" would have many title columns for each language. (The localized title columns can be propagated by the existing database of inter-wiki language links). Furthermore since "properties/relations" have titles/"page-ids"; they could also be localized. Allowing you to query the shared structured dataset in your local language.
Then something like external data extension will tie wikidata to all the current language wikis. This can be thought of as commons but for data. (likewise external to wikimedia wikis could use this structured data). This lets template authors concentrate on localized representation of the data (calling the native language properties) , articles authors can focus on the article (instead of huge seed of hard to maintain template data), and structured data folks can focus on importing data into the central shared repository.
--michael
Marcus Buck wrote:
Lars Aronsson hett schreven:
What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing?
Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself? If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned something useful from another one?
As you are speaking of infoboxes and crosswiki, I want to chip in another thought: why do we actually place infobox templates on every single wiki? In 2007 I created some semiautomatic bot articles about municipalities on my home wiki. In 2008 they had elections and elected new mayors. So my articles mentioning the mayors were outdated. The articles in the main language of that country were updated relatively quickly, Mine are not yet. I plan to do, but who does that for all articles in all language editions?
An example: Bavaria held communal elections in March 2008. Enough time to update infoboxes. The municipality Adelzhausen got Lorenz Braun as new mayor, replacing Thomas Goldstein. I checked all interwikis of the German article. Two had it right. Both were created after the elections. Four don't mention the mayor at all, and six still mentioned the old mayor. No wiki had bothered to update the information.
It would be much easier, if we had a central repository for the data. We would place infoboxes in the central wiki. Each wiki then could fetch the data from the central wiki just as images are fetched from Commons and render the data into a localised infobox. That would be much more accurate than maintaining redundant info on potentially hundreds of
wikis.
Marcus Buck
PS: And that would be interesting in regard to "botopedias" too. Volapük Wikipedia was massively critized for creating masses of bot content. With a central wiki for data creating articles for example for all the ~37,000 municipalities of France would essentially be reduced to creating a template that renders the central content into an article. Little Wikipedias could greatly benefit, if they just had to create some templates to make available info on hundreds of thousands of topics to the speakers of their language. It would be very basic, infobox-like information, but it would be information.
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Michael Dale wrote:
hmm ... my feeling is that it would be easier to adapt semantic wiki to include language aliasing than adapt omega wiki to be less dictionary centric
Suddenly we're discussing the Total Makeover of Wikipedia instead of small, incremental improvements. That's precisely the opposite of my intention with starting this thread.
My question was: When you copy an idea, a thought pattern, from another language of Wikipedia, or when you want to do so, how do you find these ideas worth copying?
I'm talking here about things you *can* do because others have already done them. I'm not talking about introducing Semantic Mediawiki or Omegawiki or how everything could have been different if only the software was written in Java or Fortran. Because such big changes are very unlikely to happen. Some of them might happen (SUL happened) but it takes time, and it only happens to very few of the very big ideas.
Yesterday, in my language of Wikipedia (Swedish), I went through all of our categories for countries, and made sure that if we do have a category for its nationality (for category:Russia, we also have a category:Russians), that this also was a subcategory both of the country and of Category:People by nation. The latter category increased from 185 to 202 subcategories. There's no automatic tool to help me in this, as far as I know, but it was only some 400 categories to click through, and some 25 I needed to edit, and it could all be done in one evening. That's a small but important improvement.
Some might say that with the magic Semantic whatever, this problem would never happen, it would solve itself. The problem is that *you* don't have the power to make that improvement in one evening, and I *had* the power to do something in one evening.
The day before, I used Multichill's tool to suggest interwiki links (http://toolserver.org/~multichill/suggest_interwiki.php) between subcategories of all categories named "...by country". I did this for Swedish and for Nynorsk, connecting them to English. I found dozens new interwiki connections between categories, and later used my bot account to fill in the missing parts of the interwiki web.
These are two recipies for how you can improve your language version of Wikipedia in an evening. But we don't have any cookbook to collect all such recipies, do we? Should we? These two recipies have now been used for the Swedish Wikipedia and we don't need to follow them again. But they can be reused on every other language. That's the interwiki experience exchange that I intended this thread to be about.
Lars Aronsson skrev:
These are two recipies for how you can improve your language version of Wikipedia in an evening. But we don't have any cookbook to collect all such recipies, do we? Should we? These two recipies have now been used for the Swedish Wikipedia and we don't need to follow them again. But they can be reused on every other language.
Hi Lars,
It'd probably a good idea to start up a collection of "Wiki Patterns" somewhere, in English. With some kind of voting for the best ideas/practices. Then the best ideas might spread.
Regards,
// Rolf Lampa
Michael Dale wrote:
We really need a wikidata type site.
A very easy and ugly workaround would be to store an image on Wikimedia Commons, containting the letters "Barack Obama" and having the filename President_of_USA.png. Next time change comes to the White House, the image is replaced with a new version. Then each language article could contain: "The president of the United States is [[file:President of USA.png]]", and the right name would automatically appear there. You'd need such images for the names of all officicials, population of all cities, and so on.
(Don't scream. I copied this idea from the visitor counters of mid-1990s websites, which were implemented by transcluding images presenting the current number of visitors.)
From this ugly hack, it's easy to conceive that Wikimedia Commons
could distribute not only images but also text snippets and data. An easy way to do this is to treat the template namespace similar to the file namespace. Files (images) that aren't found on the local wiki, are imported from Wikimedia Commons. If the template {{president of the USA}} is not found locally, that template would be sought on Wikimedia Commons.
With the right parameter setup and #switch: constructs, it could be handled with just a few templates, e.g. {{president|USA}} containing {{#switch: {{{1}}}|USA=Obama|Russia=Medvedev}}.
Of course, we'd need similar templates for Cyrillic and Arabic scripts. But they could be named {{Президент}} and contain {{#switch:{{{1}}}|США=Обама|Россия=Медведев}}, etc.
Of course, this kind of transclusion doesn't help you to write the article about Barack Obama, where it says that "he was elected president of the United States in 2008 and took office in January 2009". But that is not a piece of text that needs to be automatically updated.
It's interesting what would happen if the template imported from Commons calls other templates, that do exist on the local wiki. In programming language terms, it would imply that template expansion has "dynamic scope", just like Emacs Lisp, rather than static or lexical scope (like most languages), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scope_(programming)
Lars Aronsson hett schreven:
Of course, we'd need similar templates for Cyrillic and Arabic scripts. But they could be named {{Президент}} and contain {{#switch:{{{1}}}|США=Обама|Россия=Медведев}}, etc.
That's yet another feature I'd love to see for Mediawiki: automatic transcription. Something like {{#transcribe: Barack Obama | en | ru }} (and one additional parameter if there are different common transcriptions for a language pair). Coding the function is trivial, it just needs some work to create the transscription tables.
Would be useful for the datawiki, but Wiktionary would benefit too, I guess.
Marcus Buck
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing?
Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself? If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned something useful from another one?
On nowiki we have done the following (re-inventing of the wheel):
We have a small set of discrete templates as the buildingstones (all names are translated):
Infobox start Infobox single column row Infobox double column row Infobox quadruple column row Infobox image Infobox doubleimage Infobox stop
These buildingstones are then used in a small number of basetemplates, such as;
Infobox biography Infobox transport Infobox geography
These basetemplates has the same general basic setup with the "least common denominator" set of parameters, and a large number (as of now, we have 32 of these) of optional parameters, as shown here for Infobox biography:
Photo Name Full name Born Died etc. etc. Optional quadruple column row #1 Optional double column row #1 Optional single column row #1 Optional quadruple column row #2 Optional double column row #2 Optional single column row #2 this goes on until #32>
If we want a specialized template for team-players, we call the {{Infobox biography}}-template and use the optional parameters to build the infobox as wanted, using the different column-sized rows to construct almost what ever we want.
We also use CSS in all of these to avoid hardcoding style-parameters in the infoboxes and to have a uniform look to the infoboxes. The base-templates have pre-set CSS-classes according to their type (transport, biography, geography etc.). The builingstones have parameters to set CSS-classes on each component of their content, which we also use during the construction of the different infoboxes.
That would mean that for one article, the following inclusions would be present (as an example): Article->1 X Infobox basketballplayer->1 X Infobox team-player->1 X Infobox biography->1 X Infobox start, 1 X Infobox image, n X Infobox single column row, n X Infobox double column row, n X Infobox quadruple row, 1 X Infobox stop This makes our onwiki maintenance much more manageable and makes our infoboxes have a uniform look (which can easily be changed in CSS with standardized classnames etc.) and as per [[WP:PERF]] I don't worry about the performance.. ;)
As for reusing raw data between infoboxes and articles, we are using more and more centralized #switch-based templates, acting like small databases. as long as there are no other ways to reuse data like this, we have to do with this type of (ab)use, and as per [[WP:PERF]] I don't worry about the performance (though I'm not happy having to wait ~1 minute for a page to render (this is an extreme situation, not used in a "real" article) ;)
/Stigmj
Infobox being broken up into templates, using general css rather than hardcoding styles? ^_^ This sounds so much like the path I've already taken on Wikia ACG with iBox, a shared repo of styles, and sync bots...
http://anime.wikia.com/wiki/Template:iBox
Actually on a similar note, the templates I use in the project have almost no inline styling at all. A class structure is used to create the various types of styles that are used inside templates. I might need to document that though.
My equivalent of Wikipedia's "wikitable" is basically: class="box table colored bordered innerbordered style-basic"
table styling, with coloring bordering and borders inside the cells, with the "basic" class of styles. You can easily go and swap style-basic for one of the other color classes on the wiki. There are also a number of other styling classes than "table". "message" for the numerous messages like protection notices, cleanup notices, and other section notices."block" for the various big blocks like image summaries, licensing templates, fair use templates, etc... And there are a number of color schemes for things like "warning", "cleanup", and even a "license" class which has sub styles for the various different groups of licensing templates.
The beauty of it all is how modular the entire thing is. The coloring is completely generic and independent of what format you use, so you could go and create an infobox with style-warning and while a little strange of an idea, it would be styled perfectly fine.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://nadir-seen-fire.com] -Nadir-Point (http://nadir-point.com) -Wiki-Tools (http://wiki-tools.com) -MonkeyScript (http://monkeyscript.nadir-point.com) -Animepedia (http://anime.wikia.com) -Narutopedia (http://naruto.wikia.com) -Soul Eater Wiki (http://souleater.wikia.com)
Stig Meireles Johansen wrote:
On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 8:13 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
What is the best way to organize infobox templates for geographic places, the one used on the French, the Polish, or the Turkish Wikipedia? What are the most important features in use on other languages of Wikipedia, that my language is still missing?
Are these questions of a kind that you sometimes ask yourself? If so, where do you go to find the answers? Are we all just copying ideas from the English Wikipedia? Or inventing our own wheels? Has anybody collected stories of how one project learned something useful from another one?
On nowiki we have done the following (re-inventing of the wheel):
We have a small set of discrete templates as the buildingstones (all names are translated):
Infobox start Infobox single column row Infobox double column row Infobox quadruple column row Infobox image Infobox doubleimage Infobox stop
These buildingstones are then used in a small number of basetemplates, such as;
Infobox biography Infobox transport Infobox geography
These basetemplates has the same general basic setup with the "least common denominator" set of parameters, and a large number (as of now, we have 32 of these) of optional parameters, as shown here for Infobox biography:
Photo Name Full name Born Died etc. etc. Optional quadruple column row #1 Optional double column row #1 Optional single column row #1 Optional quadruple column row #2 Optional double column row #2 Optional single column row #2 this goes on until #32>
If we want a specialized template for team-players, we call the {{Infobox biography}}-template and use the optional parameters to build the infobox as wanted, using the different column-sized rows to construct almost what ever we want.
We also use CSS in all of these to avoid hardcoding style-parameters in the infoboxes and to have a uniform look to the infoboxes. The base-templates have pre-set CSS-classes according to their type (transport, biography, geography etc.). The builingstones have parameters to set CSS-classes on each component of their content, which we also use during the construction of the different infoboxes.
That would mean that for one article, the following inclusions would be present (as an example): Article->1 X Infobox basketballplayer->1 X Infobox team-player->1 X Infobox biography->1 X Infobox start, 1 X Infobox image, n X Infobox single column row, n X Infobox double column row, n X Infobox quadruple row, 1 X Infobox stop This makes our onwiki maintenance much more manageable and makes our infoboxes have a uniform look (which can easily be changed in CSS with standardized classnames etc.) and as per [[WP:PERF]] I don't worry about the performance.. ;)
As for reusing raw data between infoboxes and articles, we are using more and more centralized #switch-based templates, acting like small databases. as long as there are no other ways to reuse data like this, we have to do with this type of (ab)use, and as per [[WP:PERF]] I don't worry about the performance (though I'm not happy having to wait ~1 minute for a page to render (this is an extreme situation, not used in a "real" article) ;)
/Stigmj
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 11:30 PM, Daniel Friesen dan_the_man@telus.net wrote:
My equivalent of Wikipedia's "wikitable" is basically: class="box table colored bordered innerbordered style-basic"
. . . and at least half of those six classes are presentational, unlike Wikipedia's entirely semantic "wikitable".
Yes, but while these may be presentational there is little way around this if we want to let styles be easily customized without giving normal users the ability to edit raw css.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://nadir-seen-fire.com] -Nadir-Point (http://nadir-point.com) -Wiki-Tools (http://wiki-tools.com) -MonkeyScript (http://monkeyscript.nadir-point.com) -Animepedia (http://anime.wikia.com) -Narutopedia (http://naruto.wikia.com) -Soul Eater Wiki (http://souleater.wikia.com)
Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 11:30 PM, Daniel Friesen dan_the_man@telus.net wrote:
My equivalent of Wikipedia's "wikitable" is basically: class="box table colored bordered innerbordered style-basic"
. . . and at least half of those six classes are presentational, unlike Wikipedia's entirely semantic "wikitable".
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org