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

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 10/14/07, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
[snip]
> 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.

If we're going as far as two edit boxes and JS magic it would probably
be better to adjust the edit window so that template parameters, (and
probably ref tags) are hidden by JS and clicking on them or moving the
cursor into them expands them.

It wouldn't be any more evil than the various syntax highlighting
user-scripts that already exist.

The parsing required to identify templates is not at all hard. (I
think it's the only aspect of our Wikitext parsing that is fairly easy
to get right... :) )

We could go even further and have it go fetch a template configuration
page  for each template, and then automatically show all the fields,
refuse to allow the user to completely remove a mandatory field,
provide hover-over/pop up help about the various field types, and even
basic input validation.

Is this line of thinking too kludgy?