[WikiEN-l] Jason Calancis on Wikipedia's technological obscurantism

[Tim Starling]

Cross-posted to wikien-l and wikitech-l.

David Gerard wrote:
> On 13/10/2007, Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>>At the very least, we should move things like WikiProjects, GA
>>nomination statuses, and other such pieces of processcruft to a
>>subpage and transclude it so that newbies trying to discuss on talk
>>pages just get "{{single template link}}". We could probably afford
>>to do the same with infoboxes and the like on main articles - move
>>them to a subpage and transclude a single template. Yes, it makes
>>editing the infobox a step less intuitive, but someone who can't
>>figure that step out probably can't handle the template syntax anyway.
> 
> 
> 
> That'sa fantastically good idea! See if it flies on the Village Pump,
> etc. A bot run would be enough once you have something acceptable to
> the VP and the most template-heavy projects.

I don't think it's a good idea at all.

Instead, I would suggest having two edit boxes on the edit page -- one 
at the top for templates, and a second one for the main article text. 
The one at the top would be hidden by default, you would click a button 
to expand it.

The dividing line between the two would be determined heuristically on 
the server side.

A link would be provided to a non-JS version of the edit page, for 
compatibility. A user preference could also be added.

Contrary to popular belief, PHP programming is not impossible.

-- Tim Starling