[WikiEN-l] Newbie friendliness, markup hell, and editing structure

[Brian]

Smart!

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 4:59 PM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com>
wrote:

> One of the reasons everyone and their sockpuppet scream "WYSIWYG
> editor" is the accumulation of intricate wiki markup on even otherwise
> simple pages. Coincidentally, this is also what prevents a WYSIWYG
> editor at the moment ;-)
> It is also said that the template hell and other things scare away
> newbies, or lead to their accidental breaking of pages.
>
> Once Upon A Time (TM), I wrote a function into MediaWiki that would
> separate some of the meta content into a separate editing area, thus
> reducing the clutter in the actual edit box. The code's still there,
> deactivated, and probably broken right now.
>
> Today, I rewrote the thing in JavaScript. It separates
> * templates, images, and horizontal lines at the top of a page
> * templates and some magic words at the end of a page
> * categories
> * language links
> into text boxes of their own. This happens automatically right after
> loading the edit page, and it all gets reconstructed into a single
> text the moment you save, preview, or diff the edit. On preview or
> diff, everything gets separated again.
>
> It is only enabled for the article namespace. Top and bottom edit
> boxes can be hidden (I could add an option to hide either as default),
> and everything can be reset to "standard", giving the normal edit page
> for the moment.
>
> Besides better structuring of article body and "meta" content, it does
> clean up whitespace, sort categories and language links
> alphabetically, etc.
>
> A demo of what it does to [[Stevan Faddy]], a short, regular biography, is
> here:
> http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipedia/less_page_clutter.png
>
> Finally, the script:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/less_edit_clutter.js
>
> It seems that there is no "withJS" option on en.wikipedia, which would
> allow for a transient demo.
> To use, add the usual incantation to your monobook.js:
> importScript('User:Magnus Manske/less edit clutter.js');
>
> Cheers,
> Magnus
>
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