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

[Magnus Manske]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 12:06 PM, Oldak Quill <oldakquill at gmail.com> wrote:
>  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).

Technically, yes, should be possible (in the article namespace, there
should be no "funny" nowiki constructs etc.).

But would that really help? I can see where it would be good to have a
reference replaced with, say, some tiny red number that one can click
on an that expands into the reference. But in a plain text editor,
there'd still be the "empty" reference; I'd have to make up some ID
for "unnamed" ones; then make some pseudo-text-table edit box
somewhere.

I could try to whip up some "monitoring script" that constantly checks
where your cursor is and somehow highlights the appropriate reference
in a list box. Might be worth a shot.

That's another thing that came to mind. Currently, I strip "[[", "]]",
and category prefix from categories and language links, and put them
in separate textboxes. But, as these are always single lines
(actually, key:value pairs), would it be more appropriate to change
these into list boxes? Then I could add pretty buttons ("Delete
category", "Add category", etc.). Of course, I could do that for the
current textareas as well.

Cheers,
Magnus