[Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

[Husky]

The Mediawiki software, the wiki syntax and the Wiki interface is in
desperate need of a few people with some knowledge on user interfaces
and semantics who can make useful suggestions on enhancing it. That
won't be easy, as the wiki syntax was built in a very organic way,
without a lot of standardization or good thought on how it will work
in the future. This had the benefit that the projects could grow very
fast, but the problems are showing right now.

WYSIWYG editors are not the solution because, as Delphine pointed out,
they don't magically add semantic meaning to text, they just make it
look pretty. What is really needed is a standard on what wikitext is,
what wikitext isn't and what wikitext will be in the future. HTML has
gone through the same process, and i believe we are on the same stage
right now as when people were beginning to think that the <blink> tag
was a bad thing.

So, something like a specification for MediaWiki wikitext should be
agreed upon (in a text document, not in the MediaWiki PHP code). After
that, on a solid foundation, nice gadgets can be built to help people
built tables and templates.

-- Hay / Husky

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 1:03 AM, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 9:14 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 2008/9/25 geni <geniice at gmail.com>:
>>> 2008/9/25 phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki at gmail.com>:
>>>> I was going to say as well, what happened to that proposal to define
>>>> references at the bottom of the article instead of inline? And then
>>>> Pathos posted a nice implementation above. It does make a whole lot
>>>> more sense from both a reader and an editor's point of view to have
>>>> reference metadata in a single place, away from the wikitext. Defining
>>>> refs with a "refname" in the text doesn't seem too bad... other than
>>>> the mess of trying to get a different stylistic system going, is there
>>>> some reason we don't do this?
>>>>
>>>> -- phoebe
>>>>
>>>
>>> Basically it results in a high maintenance cost with a fairly high
>>> chance of errors. It means you have to keep the article text and the
>>> end section in sync rather than just keeping all the stuff in one
>>> place.
>>
>> If a reference is used more than once, it's not all in one place
>> anyway. It actually solves the issue of someone accidentally deleting
>> the text for the ref not realising it is used elsewhere. For refs only
>> used once, it makes maintenance of the ref a little harder, but
>> maintenance of the rest of the article much easier.
>
> And arguably it would make it easier, not harder, if you had several
> similar refs, to correct any errors in all of your references at once,
> see irregularities, etc.
>
> -- phoebe
>
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