[Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

[Ting Chen]

Domas Mituzas wrote:
> Hi!
>
>   
>> I tried to correct a sentence on the article MySpace in the English
>> Wikipedia today. Well, I never got around to doing it.
>>     
>
>
> Thats the penalty you get for thinking about MySpace :)
>
> On the serious side, that will be one very useful hacking project -  
> ability to hide template code in edit boxes, or even better -  
> providing visual template editors once someone clicks template object  
> (as expected metadata is already known).
> The only problem with it is that someone will have to implement it. :)
>
>   
I think we should carefully redesign our templates. Templates was 
invented at the beginning with little design, and if I recall correctly, 
they are at the beginning also very simple. There were no conditions for 
example in the templates and often there were start and closing 
templates seperated. With the time new functionalities was implemented 
to overcome these problems. But they had made the templates very 
complicated.

In the best case, the normal editor doesn't want to bother with the code 
of the template. Very often, when he is making changes in a text, he 
would not bother with templates at all. So, to hide the bulg of the 
template would be nice. Just like in Eclipse to hide a function. For 
example if the Text reads so:

+{{Two other uses|...}}
+{{US state |...}}
'''Washington''' (+{{IPAEng|...}}) is a [[U.S. state|state]] in the 
[[Pacific Northwest]] region of the [[United States]]. Washington was 
carved out of the western part of [[Washington Territory]] and admitted 
to the Union as the 42nd state in 1889. In 2006, the [[United States 
Census Bureau|Census Bureau]] estimated the state's population at 
6,395,798.
...

It would be easier to edit for the editors who just want to make changes 
in the text. The plus-signes can be clicked and if he clicks at the 
plus-sign he would see the template content, with mandatory fields 
highlighted. If someone want to, for instance, start a new article and 
want to put a template somewhere. He types in for instance 
{{Infobox_scientist| and an assistant would open up, with all parameters 
listed and the mandatory parameters highlighted.

Any way that is my dream. But Eclipse is rich client and I am not sure 
if this is ever available on a browser oriented editor.

And it needs that we do some reingeneering on our template concepts. For 
example I would like to see that only templates that are "benign" can be 
used in the text. As benign templates I mean templates that are in 
themselves closed. Breaking down on HTML, if a template starts with 
<table>, it should end with </table>, if it starts with <td> it should 
end with </td> and so on. Such templates I call benign. I am not sure if 
we still have those "ugly" templates somewhere. The taxo-templates 
before the Taxobox are introduced are such ugly templates. The other 
benefit for this approach is that you can really very easy extract 
keyword informations out of such templates. You can have a bot go 
through all benign templates and make a DTD-file for them all and you 
can be sure that these templates are closed and you can extract the 
content in it into an XML-file without problem. The negative side of 
this is we must go through all our articles and eliminate the "ugly" 
templates and replace them in "benign" templates.

Ting