Hey there.
I love MediaWiki and have been using it everywhere for years. Recently I've been doing some rather major documentation and I realised there were three features which would be really handy for me (if these or similar already exist I would love to know!):
1. For links to articles in sections on the same page it would be really handy if we had syntax like: [[#unity|]] which would auto-complete to [[#unity|unity]] for you.
2. For duplicated content it would be handy if you could define a bunch of "variables" down the bottom of a page and then reference them from elsewhere. I am aware of templates, but those are overkill and difficult to maintain per my use case (my use case is documenting the "purpose" of a computer, I duplicate this in various places, but don't want to maintain templates for that).
3. It would be cool if for any given wiki page an "estimated reading time" could be provided. Along with maybe a word count, character count, etc.
Since I'm here, quick thanks to the MediaWiki community for creating such wonderful wiki software!
Regards, John Elliot V
2017-11-17 8:15 GMT+02:00 John Elliot V jj5@jj5.net:
- For duplicated content it would be handy if you could define a bunch
of "variables" down the bottom of a page and then reference them from elsewhere. I am aware of templates, but those are overkill and difficult to maintain per my use case (my use case is documenting the "purpose" of a computer, I duplicate this in various places, but don't want to maintain templates for that).
Can you give an example of how these "variables" would be different from templates?
- It would be cool if for any given wiki page an "estimated reading
time" could be provided. Along with maybe a word count, character count, etc.
This is a very good idea, and I've been writing a longish proposal for this myself, which I hope to post somewhere very soon.
In the meantime, as a workaround, you can use the reading mode in Firefox for this.
Since I'm here, quick thanks to the MediaWiki community for creating such wonderful wiki software!
Thank you! :)
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Hey John,
Fellow MediaWiki lover here. I like your ideas, here are some quick thoughts:
1. What about a template like the following
Template Name (L for link, and also short) Template:L
Template Contents: [[{{FULLPAGENAME}}#{{{1|}}}|{{{1|}}}]]
Template Use (where unity is a section on the page) {{L|unity}}
If this generally works, you might want to add some more functionality like:
1. A second input if you want to change what the section reads like; {{L|unity|alternate text}} 2. Probably some better error handling
2. Have you tried transclusion https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Transclusion ?
3. I "think" the magic word {{REVISIONSIZE}} gives the byte size of the article. If so, maybe you could use it with some ParserFunctions https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions to calculate an estimated reading time? Example:
This page will take around {{#expr: {{REVISIONSIZE}}/1000 round 1 }} minutes to read.
Cheers, Bryan
On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 10:58 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
2017-11-17 8:15 GMT+02:00 John Elliot V jj5@jj5.net:
- For duplicated content it would be handy if you could define a bunch
of "variables" down the bottom of a page and then reference them from elsewhere. I am aware of templates, but those are overkill and difficult to maintain per my use case (my use case is documenting the "purpose" of a computer, I duplicate this in various places, but don't want to maintain templates for that).
Can you give an example of how these "variables" would be different from templates?
- It would be cool if for any given wiki page an "estimated reading
time" could be provided. Along with maybe a word count, character count, etc.
This is a very good idea, and I've been writing a longish proposal for this myself, which I hope to post somewhere very soon.
In the meantime, as a workaround, you can use the reading mode in Firefox for this.
Since I'm here, quick thanks to the MediaWiki community for creating such wonderful wiki software!
Thank you! :)
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I have a very dumb script in my common.js for this, look for '// Reading time' in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Prtksxna/common.js
—prtksxna
On Fri, Nov 17, 2017 at 12:40 PM, Bryan Hilderbrand bryanh@tegnosis.wiki wrote:
Hey John,
Fellow MediaWiki lover here. I like your ideas, here are some quick thoughts:
- What about a template like the following
Template Name (L for link, and also short) Template:L
Template Contents: [[{{FULLPAGENAME}}#{{{1|}}}|{{{1|}}}]]
Template Use (where unity is a section on the page) {{L|unity}}
If this generally works, you might want to add some more functionality like:
- A second input if you want to change what the section reads like;
{{L|unity|alternate text}} 2. Probably some better error handling
- Have you tried transclusion https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Transclusion
?
- I "think" the magic word {{REVISIONSIZE}} gives the byte size of the
article. If so, maybe you could use it with some ParserFunctions https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:ParserFunctions to calculate an estimated reading time? Example:
This page will take around {{#expr: {{REVISIONSIZE}}/1000 round 1 }} minutes to read.
Cheers, Bryan
On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 10:58 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
2017-11-17 8:15 GMT+02:00 John Elliot V jj5@jj5.net:
- For duplicated content it would be handy if you could define a bunch
of "variables" down the bottom of a page and then reference them from elsewhere. I am aware of templates, but those are overkill and difficult to maintain per my use case (my use case is documenting the "purpose" of a computer, I duplicate this in various places, but don't want to maintain templates for that).
Can you give an example of how these "variables" would be different from templates?
- It would be cool if for any given wiki page an "estimated reading
time" could be provided. Along with maybe a word count, character count, etc.
This is a very good idea, and I've been writing a longish proposal for this myself, which I hope to post somewhere very soon.
In the meantime, as a workaround, you can use the reading mode in Firefox for this.
Since I'm here, quick thanks to the MediaWiki community for creating such wonderful wiki software!
Thank you! :)
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ 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 Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 11:15 PM, John Elliot V jj5@jj5.net wrote:
- For duplicated content it would be handy if you could define a bunch
of "variables" down the bottom of a page and then reference them from elsewhere. I am aware of templates, but those are overkill and difficult to maintain per my use case (my use case is documenting the "purpose" of a computer, I duplicate this in various places, but don't want to maintain templates for that).
This sounds like something that you could do with https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite. Citations are really just footnotes and each can be named when defined and then reused by reference at other places in the same article. There is a example of this at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite#Multiple_uses_of_the_same_footnote.
Bryan
As it happens, the yearly feature wishlist collection process is taking proposals right now; you might want to check it out. [0]
On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 10:15 PM, John Elliot V jj5@jj5.net wrote:
- For links to articles in sections on the same page it would be really
handy if we had syntax like: [[#unity|]] which would auto-complete to [[#unity|unity]] for you.
If you feel like writing a patch, this kind of thing is called a pre-save transform, and handled in Parser::pstPass2().
- For duplicated content it would be handy if you could define a bunch
of "variables" down the bottom of a page and then reference them from elsewhere. I am aware of templates, but those are overkill and difficult to maintain per my use case (my use case is documenting the "purpose" of a computer, I duplicate this in various places, but don't want to maintain templates for that).
That's the Variables extension [1] if you want to use it on the same page, or the Labeled Section Transclusion extension [2] if you want to reference it elsewhere. I doubt you end up with something that's easier to maintain, though.
- It would be cool if for any given wiki page an "estimated reading
time" could be provided. Along with maybe a word count, character count, etc.
https://tools.wmflabs.org/wikipedia-readability/ provides Flesch-Kincaid scores, although not inside the page.
[0] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2017_Community_Wishlist_Survey [1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Variables [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Labeled_Section_Transclusion
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