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

[Steve Bennett]

On 3/13/08, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com> wrote:

In general, I really like the goal here - removing metadata from the
body of the wikitext. However, I"m a bit torn by the idea of then
separating and reformatting some of that metadata. It's nice to
display categories in a list and allow them to be manipulated
directly, if the underlying data structure is a list. But the
underlying data structure is really just a number of embedded
elements:

[[category:foo]]
blah
[[category:x]]

etc. The same arguments against wysiwyg apply, in weaker form, here:
the underlying text is rearranged, people may have had reasons for
ordering categories in a certain way etc. For example, how will this
be resaved:

[[Category:Martian rock singers]]
<!-- as per lengthy discussion, DO NOT REMOVE -->
[[Category:Jewish Martian golfers]]

Will the comment be trimmed? etc.

Since there is very little consensus over the "correct" ordering of
metadata, any tool which reformats metadata in some rigid format is
bound to step on some toes. Which is probably just an argument for
*reaching* some consensus on metadata formatting, of course.

Perhaps one solution to this is to make the GUI dynamic, reflecting
the contents of the wikitext. That is, this:
----
{{hatnote}}
Some text<ref>RRR</ref>
Foo
[[Category:blah]]

{{template}}

[[Category:foo]]
<references />
----

Could produce an editing environment as follows:

* Edit box for header stuff, containing {{hatnote}}
* Edit box for main text, containing "Some text <<ref>> / Foo"
* List box for categories, containing blah
* Edit box for footer stuff, containing {{template}}
* List box for categories, containing foo
* List box for references

That is, the wikitext is effectively decomposed into sections, and
edit boxes of the appropriate types assembled in order.

Someone is bound to mention that since it's javascript, anyone can
customise it however they want, but I think that's the wrong approach.
We should be trying to find a good solution that satisfies almost
everyone, and end up with almost all users of Wikipedia using it.

Steve