[Foundation-l] Template Overkill

[teun spaans]

Both are true. Yes, templates are very useful, and yes, imho they do scare
away newbies.
Templates are useful not for navigation (that could be done without
templates) but for sparing human and bot effort.
Unfortunately many templates are at the top of our articles, so its the
first thing that new volunteers see.

I see some overlap with the discussion started by David on WYSIWYG editing.
WYSIWYG editors can not deal with our templates.
A WYSIWYG editor with 2 modes (WYSIWYG and old fashioned wiki markup) would
do a good job. The WYSIWYG modus should support standard wiki markup like
* lists (#, *)
* bold, underline, italic (')
* headers (=)
* tables (preferably, but not necessarily))
I think this covers the bulk of what we have in our articles as far as
normal editing goes. The templates can be hidden/ignored for editing
purposes in WYSIWYG editing mode.

With a two mode editor, such as blogger supports, we can have a best of both
worlds: Newbies have an easy start, while old hands can still have all the
templates the want.

Teun Spaans
On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 5:59 AM, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:

> What  project are you speaking of?  At en.WS the entire navigation
> structure of
> how to move between Chapters within a book is encoded in templates.  I
> can't
> imagine how they could be scapped.
>
> Birgitte SB
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> > From: "WJhonson at aol.com" <WJhonson at aol.com>
> > To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> > Sent: Tue, December 28, 2010 9:46:56 PM
> > Subject: [Foundation-l] Template Overkill
> >
> > Most of the templates in our project, imho are just more clutter.
> >
> > The number of people who know how to use any particular template, can
> > probably be counted with a box of marbles.  However when others see the
> > templates, they just shy away, they don't bother to try to learn them.
> >
> > If we want to make things easier for editors, we should scrape templates
> > entirely.  What they add to the project is not worth, what they detract.
> >
> > W
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