The soon-to-come third version of the usability extension, Citron, will be able to collapse templates in the edit window: http://usability.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Updated_Citron_templat...
The problem with this approach is that sometimes collapsing is harmful to the readability of the wikitext. For example, huwiki has a template which looks like this: "Water is generally thought to be wet, {{citation needed|text=though some argue it is actually dry}}." That is, it can be used to select a specific part of the text and mark it as problematic. There are many similar templates which annotate a section of the text without breaking its flow; of you collapse the template, the text becomes much harder to read.
The reason I'm asking about this is that we're just about to reorganize some template parameter naming conventions, and would like to consider future compatibility with Citron, and the only solution to the above problem I can think of is to have a whitelist of template parameter names whose values will be visible even in a collapsed state. (Being able to define such parameters with per-template settings would be more flexible, but I suppose it is very expensive to do so.) So, is there a chance Citron will have such a feature in the future and there is value in giving all such parameters a common, distinctive, non-numeric name?
2010/4/3 Tisza Gergő gtisza@gmail.com:
The reason I'm asking about this is that we're just about to reorganize some template parameter naming conventions, and would like to consider future compatibility with Citron, and the only solution to the above problem I can think of is to have a whitelist of template parameter names whose values will be visible even in a collapsed state. (Being able to define such parameters with per-template settings would be more flexible, but I suppose it is very expensive to do so.) So, is there a chance Citron will have such a feature in the future and there is value in giving all such parameters a common, distinctive, non-numeric name?
We've also been thinking about integrating these features with template metadata. We were mostly thinking about things like parameter types and descriptions, but collapsibility could be another attribute of a template.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
Roan Kattouw <roan.kattouw <at> gmail.com> writes:
We've also been thinking about integrating these features with template metadata. We were mostly thinking about things like parameter types and descriptions, but collapsibility could be another attribute of a template.
Ideally it should be a per-parameter attribute; for example, {{citation needed|text=2+2=5|from=January 2009}} should be displayed as [citation needed]2+2=5] for maximum readability.
The problem with the metadata approach is that while usually you can get away with loading it in the background when the user clicks on the collapsed icon, collapsibility metadata must be available for all templates as soon as the page is loaded. That would mean dozens, sometimes hundreds of extra queries for a single edit screen, or some sort of template metadata cache.
I have some interest in adding metadata to templates with some new template editing features I'm hoping to work on ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Jesse_Groppi/GSOC_2010 ). I see what you're saying about the extra queries involved, and since I would like to add even more, I'm curious to hear how much trouble these few hundred extra queries would cause the average user?
On 03/04/2010 15:50, Tisza Gergő wrote:
Roan Kattouw<roan.kattouw<at> gmail.com> writes:
We've also been thinking about integrating these features with template metadata. We were mostly thinking about things like parameter types and descriptions, but collapsibility could be another attribute of a template.
Ideally it should be a per-parameter attribute; for example, {{citation needed|text=2+2=5|from=January 2009}} should be displayed as [citation needed]2+2=5] for maximum readability.
The problem with the metadata approach is that while usually you can get away with loading it in the background when the user clicks on the collapsed icon, collapsibility metadata must be available for all templates as soon as the page is loaded. That would mean dozens, sometimes hundreds of extra queries for a single edit screen, or some sort of template metadata cache.
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So, a couple of things about template collapsing:
1. This will only be available as an experimental feature for a while while we experiment with its usefulness/usability/etc
2. You're dead on with the readability being harmed by simply blindly collapsing all templates. There's a definite need for some templates to be displayed in collapsed form with a name other than the template name. For instance, infoboxes should be titled based on what they're about... a little box that says [Barack Obama] or [Infobox: Barack Obama] is way more helpful than [Infobox].
The way we were planning on extending this is with the TemplateInfo extension, so that every template could define this information, and specify which parameter(s) should be in the display name, or just specify that this template is to never be collapsed, etc. So yes, in the future we'll support this more.
-Nimish
On 4/3/10 12:11 PM, Tisza Gergő wrote:
The soon-to-come third version of the usability extension, Citron, will be able to collapse templates in the edit window: http://usability.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Updated_Citron_templat...
The problem with this approach is that sometimes collapsing is harmful to the readability of the wikitext. For example, huwiki has a template which looks like this: "Water is generally thought to be wet, {{citation needed|text=though some argue it is actually dry}}." That is, it can be used to select a specific part of the text and mark it as problematic. There are many similar templates which annotate a section of the text without breaking its flow; of you collapse the template, the text becomes much harder to read.
The reason I'm asking about this is that we're just about to reorganize some template parameter naming conventions, and would like to consider future compatibility with Citron, and the only solution to the above problem I can think of is to have a whitelist of template parameter names whose values will be visible even in a collapsed state. (Being able to define such parameters with per-template settings would be more flexible, but I suppose it is very expensive to do so.) So, is there a chance Citron will have such a feature in the future and there is value in giving all such parameters a common, distinctive, non-numeric name?
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