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

[Magnus Manske]

On 10/15/07, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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.

You mean, like the on-the-fly separation (and reintegration) of
language links, categories, and "invisible/at-the-end-of-the-article"
templates I hacked into the core code during the Berlin CCC in 2005?
2004? ;-)

Seriously, I think separation of such meta-data on the fly is possible
and should be attempted again. Part of which would encompass
header/footer templates. Maybe "surround" the main edit box with three
(initially hidden) boxes, on the top (header templates, infoboxes), on
the right (categories, interlanguage), and bottom (bottom templates,
end-of-article navboxes).

If this too extreme, maybe we could create bogus section links that
would /only/ show top or bottom templates in the edit box.

Cheers,
Magnus