[WikiEN-l] Preformatted blank articles? (was Experiment on new pages and GFDL)

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 12/10/05, Andrew Gray <shimgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/12/05, Brian Haws <brian at bhaws.com> wrote:
>
> (...)
>
> > Writing from the peanut gallery, I think this is a great idea, it plants the
> > seed in new editors heads that those components are an intergral part of a
> > well formatted article. Where does it go from here?
>
> 1 - Find out if MediaWiki can handle automatically filling a new edit
> box with boilerplate text, preferably able to restrict the function to
> the main namespace.

It used to insert the contents of $newarticletext (which is now
specified by [[mediawiki:newarticletext]]) into the edit box for the
new article.  This was changed so it inserts this text above the edit
box.  I assume it wouldn't be hard to add a new variable
($newarticleeditbox?) and put this in the edit box.  Here's the
relevant code from February 2005:

                        if ( 'edit' == $action ) {
                                wfProfileOut( $fname );
                                return ''; # was "newarticletext", now
moved above the box)
                        }

I don't think this checks whether or not this is in the article
namespace though, that'd have to be added.

It'd likely be a really easy feature to add, and by default
newarticleeditbox (or newarticleboilerplate, or whatever) would be
blank, and it'd be up to the individual projects to decide whether or
not to fill it.

Anthony