[WikiEN-l] Ok, so about that ISBN template...

[Stephen Bain]

On 8/5/06, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> However, my reasoning for creating it seemed sound: to provide an
> abstraction layer so users don't have to learn the rather arbitrary
> syntax that Wikipedia uses to deal with ISBN codes.

It's hardly a complicated syntax. It's hardly even a syntax: type
"ISBN", then a space, then the number.

> Similarly, although the ISBN syntax is "simple" it may not be
> "intuitive". What is the first reaction of people confronted with the
> problem of inserting an ISBN number likely to be? "How do I make this
> do that cool link thing?" What are they then most likely to try?
> {{ISBN|34895342985}} maybe?

I don't know about everyone else, but when I was learning wikisyntax I
did it by opening an edit window of existing pages and seeing what was
there.

In any event, the ISBN magic syntax produces a unique behaviour, a
link to an automatically generated Special:Booksources page, and so it
probably should be using its own syntax.[1] Using template syntax as
an abstraction layer to hide the real operation is likely to confuse
anyone who really wants to know how it works and takes a look at the
template code.

I'm aware of the argument against magic-word-type syntax, but there
are plenty of magic words in MediaWiki, most of which are very useful:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words

Of course there is room for the syntax for ISBNs, and other magic
words, to be improved by making them more consistent with each other.
Perhaps something like #ISBN 123456789, like the redirect syntax.

> I'm just a bit dismayed by the kind of reasoning that goes on at some
> of these deletion debates, where instead of "is this harmful?" we have
> "is this needed?"

There was some reasoning that suggested it was harmful. The comment
that it's pointless and sometimes harmful to have templates which use
more characters than the text they produce is a good one. Sometimes a
template may allow other problems to be avoided, such as {{!}}.
However you mentioned {{--}}, which is a lazy duplication of the
emdash in the toolbox below every edit window.

To conclude, the documentation on magic word syntaxes (in this case
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ISBN) should be improved and
made more prominent to noobs learning how to write wiki. But I think
that using templates to abstract magic words is a fairly silly
proposition, it's hiding problems rather than addressing them.

--
[1] Yes, variables such as {{PAGENAME}} also use the template syntax,
but they perform text substitution (an expected behaviour of
templates) and are distinguished by their ALL CAPS naming.

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com