On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 6:59 PM, Magnus Manske
<magnusmanske(a)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.
...
Cheers,
Magnus
I'm using it now. I really like it, but after a few minutes a few
things strike me:
# How about a box for External links sections? It makes quite as much
sense as one for References or headers.
# When there's nothing for a particular section, it would be great if
your script could collapse the box until opened; and then if you add
stuff into it, it could insert it into the article with the
appropriate header in the appropriate place. That would be neat.
--
gwern