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

[Brian]

On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 9:16 PM, Robert Rohde<rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Placement by reference aka "move all the nasty stuff to the bottom" :p

I think this approach would be good combined with the ability to
declare facts ala `born on [[birthday::July 6, 1946]]'. That way we no
longer have nasty stuff at all - we simply reference a template  such
as <display name="infobox" /> which gets its arguments from the facts
declared in the article which called it.

The method of declaring facts in wikilinks is indeed derived from
semantic mediawiki. But I just look at it as a testbed for good ideas,
not as an extension for WMF to install.