Hello everyone,

Please allow me to introduce myself, my name is Leonardo and I'm a contributor to the Spanish Wikipedia.

I've joined this list some days ago since I want to contribute to wiki software, specially to the Spanish encyclopedia implementation of it.

So, without any further formalities, here's a list of things I wanted to ask you guys.

* How are u doing? :)

* Ok, I understand the English Wikipedia made a transition to a new software written in PHP. Do I have to wait too long before I see the transition to the new software on the international wikipedias?

* Can I get the new software sources? Where?

* About the handling of bugs and feature requests, I think Bugzilla is a great idea. I, for one, would rely on it heavily to make contributions to the project.

So, I guess what I'm trying to tell you is, is it a good idea if I work on the old (perl) wiki software? or should I wait for the PHP wiki?.. bear in mind that I'm mostly interested in the improvement of the Spanish Wikipedia (although, if I can contribute to other projects in the process, and eventually make the world a better place, I won't get mad :)

Personally, I have a couple of ideas I'd like to implement on the wiki software:

(a) A new, easier(?) way to create tables inside wiki pages. I understand that some time ago, somebody wanted to do something like this with vertical bars (`|'):

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/How_does_one_edit_a_page/Old+version (near the bottom of the page)

I wouldn't implement this feature in the same way (I don't even understand it completely!), but basically I want to create an alternative method to include tables in the encyclopedia without HTML.

(b) Ok, I know this may sound like pure evil, but I think that Wikipedia could use some javascript on the editing pages (action=edit).

And before you start throwing sharpened things in my direction, please let me expand my argument.

Wikipedia is a great tool, and it's certainly very easy to edit pages and contribute to the project, but a plain <textarea> box is an arguably limited widget. Now, I'm not saying this is a critical issue. It works, and it works pretty darn good, but maybe we could take advantage of some tools that would improve the editing experience (wow, I sound like a marketroid :-).

Granted, this may be about just pure eye-candy stuff, and it may piss off many javascript haters. But please remember that (1) it could be implemented carefully, so it doesn't break anything on any browser, and remain standards-compliant, and (2) it could be an optional feature, so in case your head aches every time you see a <script> tag, you could just turn it off.

Well, so what can Javascript do for us on the editing pages? I can think of the following uses right now:

- A collection of buttons that allow you to insert special symbols easily (like a character map, right there beside your editing box)

- A collection of buttons that insert special tags quickly. For example, if I press a button labeled "strike out", I get the "<strike></strike>" tags inserted in my text right away.

- A "Preview" area, updated immediately every time I type a character.

I know these are just lame examples, but I guess you get the idea.

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So, in conclusion, I'm just another guy that wants to contribute with the Wikipedia Project. Hopefully I'll manage to start coding a lot more than talking real soon... :)

Thanks,

Leonardo Boshell