[Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages

[Robert Rohde]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Brion Vibber<brion at wikimedia.org> wrote:
>> As many folks have noted, our current templating system works ok for
>> simple things, but doesn't scale well -- even moderately complex
>> conditionals or text-munging will quickly turn your template source into
>> what appears to be line noise.
>
> In addition to changing the programming language that is used in the
> template namespace a lot of progress can be made on the readability of
> articles (and thus how usable they are) by rethinking how we invoke
> templates, or rather how we make data available to templates.
>
> If you look at the George W. Bush article you see that the first 50
> lines of the article are template code and that his birthday is
> declared multiple times like so:
>
> |birth_date={{birth date and age|mf=yes|1946|7|6}}
> born July 6, 1946
> |DATE OF BIRTH=July 6, 1946
>
> Editors clearly need a better system for declaring facts about
> articles and then using them in advanced template programming. One can
> imagine an alternate system where his birthday is only declared once,
> like so, in the article text: born on [[birthday::July 6, 1946]]. And
> so on for all the other facts listed in his infobox. Rather than
> declaring them explicitly in the infobox, you declare them explicitly
> inline in the text in a highly readable format.
>
> Then there is the issue of calling templates. Where do you place them
> within the article? Much like MediaWiki itself I suggest we introduce
> the notion of hooks. Beginning of article, end of article. Beginning
> of section, end of section. Beginning of paragraph end of paragraph.
> Template programmers can use these hooks to inject data that is
> declared explicitly in the article into various points of the article.
>
> This can be thought of as a separation of content and presentation.
> Articles have the constraint that their source code must, under all
> circumstances, be highly readable to our visitors. That way our
> visitors might become encyclopedia writers! Associated with those
> articles is another page where users can control higher level
> organizations of the content in the body of text. They can format it
> in infobox style, process it any way they like using our new
> programming language, and place it in a variety of locations
> throughout the article without sacrificing the readability of the
> wikitext at all.
>
> It will take a little bit more conceptual work to handle all cases,
> such as inline references, etc.., etc... But the bottom line is that
> the source code to articles on Wikipedia has become so complicated
> that it is now too difficult for reasonable people to consider
> editing. One user said that adding a new programming language to
> MediaWiki is totally orthogonal to the method that we use to pass data
> to those programs, or the context in which those programs are called.
> I couldn't disagree more - one of the major reasons Wikipedia is so
> unreadable today is because of the way we call templates from
> articles. From the bottom of the design to the top, it needs to be
> rethought. I believe that this conversation should be held far beyond
> wikitech-l and should be made available to subscribers of almost all
> of our lists and also the large pool of contributors. One of the
> reasons that we ended up with ParserFunctions is that very few people
> were involved in the conversation. Do we even understand the problem
> that needs to be solved? I am not convinced that it has been
> adequately characterized.

I'm not sure how one would make your hook system work in a way that
was practical and not totally opaque to the editor.

An idea that has been toyed with a couple of other places is to allow
defined blocks and references to them in article text.  For example:

An article might start:

<display name="infobox" />
Thomas Jefferson was the third president...

and at the end of the article have:

<define name="infobox">
{{infobox
...
}}
</define>

It would provide the flexibility to place items where needed in the
article while moving the complex wikicode into a separate segment
that's less likely to confuse novices.  One could also call <display>
multiple times if there is an element (like a birth date) that needs
to be repeated in some awkward manner.

There is actually code lying around somewhere that implements such a
system for <ref> so that the first call would not need to attach the
full reference definition but could simply use <ref name="foo" /> if a
corresponding <ref_define name="foo">...</ref> appeared later in the
text.

Personally, my guess is that a system of placement by reference would
make for a more flexible / less confusing approach than trying to
create a system of article hooks and attach infoboxes and the like to
them.

-Robert Rohde