[Wikimania-l] attending 'mania? add yourself to [[attendees]]...

[church.of.emacs.ml]

Hi,

On 06/11/2010 10:23 PM, Jon Harald Søby wrote:
> That page is not very KISS. It took me (a veteran Wikipedian with a
> severe case of template skills) more than five minutes to figure out how
> to edit my entry - for less experienced editors it would probably take
> longer. So its layout should definitely be changed.

I concur that editing an existing entry is a bit difficult. I didn't
think it would happen a lot, as most of the entered information *should*
be static (like username, home wiki) and not subject to changes.
There are two different philosophies:
* Try to make adding yourself simpler by making the system complex (e.g.
a complex template system).
* Try to make adding yourself simpler by keeping the system simple (e.g.
a simple list).

Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. The former (which is
the one I chose) makes it easy to translate the page and provide *all*
the information in a sorted, quite presentable and machine-readable way.
Adding yourself to the list is also very easy (as opposed to learning
WikiSyntax or adding yourself to a table as in [[External Review]]).
It has of course the disadvantage that it gets quite difficult if you
want to understand the underlying template system instead of just using
the provided interfaces. Template coding sucks in Mediawiki, we know that :)

I've added a comment in the sections which give hints where to look
(<!-- Edit your entry here: [[Template:Attendees/100]] -->). Perhaps
that helps a little.

Regards,

User:Church of emacs

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