[Mediawiki-l] that awful <ref> syntax

[Monahon, Peter B.]

> Earlier question: "...what's the problem 
> you see in IPE In Place Editing / 
> WYSIWYG What You See Is What You Get?..."

> Earlier Answer: "... Loss of templates 
> and CSS. ... Do we really want every 
> wiki page to look different [Sure, 
> template overload has caused some 
> of that but generally not within a 
> single wiki.]? Hardly any "regular" 
> user of Word uses styles and rarely do 
> "regular" web page authors use CSS. 
> All of the styling is done inline. Ugh. 
> THAT's the problem with WYSIWYG. I 
> will agree that asking these people to 
> learn wiki-text is asking a bit much - 
> especially with complex inclusion 
> templates, but I would MUCH rather 
> have an extension that presents a 
> form based on a template that allows 
> users easier manipulation of data in 
> the wiki than to go straight 
> WYSIWYG or IPE..."

Peter Blaise responds:  Fascinating - a third alternative, SI Structured
Input.  Now, we have:

UI / RTACE - Unformatted Input / Raw Text And Code Editing

Alternatives being proposed:

WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get

IPE - In Place Editing, including WYSIWYG by default

PS/FBI - Pre Structured / Form Based Input (IS - Structured Input)

My challenge to PS/FBI - Pre Structured / Form Based Input is the PRE
part of it - all future, subsequent input must be PRE-thought of by
someone else, first.  So, if I want to do something new, what do I do,
apply for a new permit from the programmers so they can build a
pre-structured input form for my nascent idea?

We're not doing data entry in a checking account register.  We're trying
to build an inclusive community, seeking contribution of, and a
repository for, the world's knowledge, freely shared - and that means
massive amounts of unprecedented INPUT, as well as OUTPUT.

As it is now, OUTPUT is freely shared, but the complexities of Wikipedia
INPUT is still a barrier for many sources of human knowledge to overcome
and contribute.

"Images" are one example of INPUT barriers.

"Categorizing" is an intermediate problem within Wikipedia once anything
has been entered or uploaded, where data already input is hardly
findable due to lack of expansive human categorization, especially
images missing EXIF and IPTC metadata.  Here's the place for a Pre
Structured / Form Based Input scheme to catalog images - the Commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/

Let's compare current Commons data collection:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&uselang=ow
nwork

{{Information
|Description=
|Source=self-made
|Date=
|Author= 
|Permission=
|other_versions=
}}

With IPTC voluminous data collection:

Text fields in the current specification include but are not limited to 
Caption, 
Caption Writer, 
Headline, 
Special Instructions, 
Keywords, 
Category, 
Supplemental Categories, 
Urgency, 
Byline, 
Byline Title, 
Credit, 
Source, 
Object Name, 
Date Created, 
City, 
Province-State, 
Country Name, 
Original Transmission Reference,
Preserve Additional Information. 

Additional fields beyond the IPTC specification:
Mark As Copyrighted
URL

And don't get me started on EXIF metadata and Maker Notes.

Also note that GPS data is starting to proliferate.

Are we doing anything with this data, intelligently, automatically?
This is where PS/FBI Pre Structured / Form Based Input can really play
an important role - helping us input and categorize data so it can be
found!