[Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

[mboverload]

Syntax highlighting and inline expansion of references and other
complex code sounds like the solution to me.  I know every developer
wants to kill anyone who says this but "that doesn't sound so hard".
WikiED already has the syntax highlighting, you would just need to
tone it down for the general public.

The only things that I see that could benefit from inline expansion are:
-Infoboxes
-References
-Tables

Outside of templates I can't see any complex code.  There's wikilinks,
bold, italics, headers, images, and tables.  Once you master those you
can edit pretty much any article.  That's all regular users need.
Period.

The benefits of the above layed out ideas would make even this mess of
wikicode manageable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Washington&action=edit


On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 5:00 PM, Ting Chen <wing.philopp at gmx.de> wrote:
> Domas Mituzas wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>>
>>> I tried to correct a sentence on the article MySpace in the English
>>> Wikipedia today. Well, I never got around to doing it.
>>>
>>
>>
>> Thats the penalty you get for thinking about MySpace :)
>>
>> On the serious side, that will be one very useful hacking project -
>> ability to hide template code in edit boxes, or even better -
>> providing visual template editors once someone clicks template object
>> (as expected metadata is already known).
>> The only problem with it is that someone will have to implement it. :)
>>
>>
> I think we should carefully redesign our templates. Templates was
> invented at the beginning with little design, and if I recall correctly,
> they are at the beginning also very simple. There were no conditions for
> example in the templates and often there were start and closing
> templates seperated. With the time new functionalities was implemented
> to overcome these problems. But they had made the templates very
> complicated.
>
> In the best case, the normal editor doesn't want to bother with the code
> of the template. Very often, when he is making changes in a text, he
> would not bother with templates at all. So, to hide the bulg of the
> template would be nice. Just like in Eclipse to hide a function. For
> example if the Text reads so:
>
> +{{Two other uses|...}}
> +{{US state |...}}
> '''Washington''' (+{{IPAEng|...}}) is a [[U.S. state|state]] in the
> [[Pacific Northwest]] region of the [[United States]]. Washington was
> carved out of the western part of [[Washington Territory]] and admitted
> to the Union as the 42nd state in 1889. In 2006, the [[United States
> Census Bureau|Census Bureau]] estimated the state's population at
> 6,395,798.
> ...
>
> It would be easier to edit for the editors who just want to make changes
> in the text. The plus-signes can be clicked and if he clicks at the
> plus-sign he would see the template content, with mandatory fields
> highlighted. If someone want to, for instance, start a new article and
> want to put a template somewhere. He types in for instance
> {{Infobox_scientist| and an assistant would open up, with all parameters
> listed and the mandatory parameters highlighted.
>
> Any way that is my dream. But Eclipse is rich client and I am not sure
> if this is ever available on a browser oriented editor.
>
> And it needs that we do some reingeneering on our template concepts. For
> example I would like to see that only templates that are "benign" can be
> used in the text. As benign templates I mean templates that are in
> themselves closed. Breaking down on HTML, if a template starts with
> <table>, it should end with </table>, if it starts with <td> it should
> end with </td> and so on. Such templates I call benign. I am not sure if
> we still have those "ugly" templates somewhere. The taxo-templates
> before the Taxobox are introduced are such ugly templates. The other
> benefit for this approach is that you can really very easy extract
> keyword informations out of such templates. You can have a bot go
> through all benign templates and make a DTD-file for them all and you
> can be sure that these templates are closed and you can extract the
> content in it into an XML-file without problem. The negative side of
> this is we must go through all our articles and eliminate the "ugly"
> templates and replace them in "benign" templates.
>
> Ting
>
>
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