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

[Oldak Quill]

On 10/03/2008, 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

Great work. Would it be possible to adapt this into a tool to separate
the source of an article into: references and everything else?

Slightly different: would it be possible to have an editing interface
where tags of the form "<ref name="">{{template}}</ref>" in the body
are pulled out to a separate text box, leaving a token in the body
text (e.g. <ref name="" />)? Separating the content of these tags
would clean up the body when editing and the token left in the body
would indicate that there is a tag here and that it has this name (see
ref text box).

-- 
Oldak Quill (oldakquill at gmail.com)