[Wikimedia-l] On the gentrification of Wikipedia, by Superbass

[Mark]

On 7/30/13 11:23 PM, James Forrester wrote:
> On 30 July 2013 13:58, Mark <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:
>
>> On 7/30/13 6:40 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:
>>
>>  From an editing perspective, it seems what's wanted here is a way to mark
>> regions of text, and then to specify what processing is done on this
>> region. As you note, {{foo|giant parameter consisting of the whole region}}
>> is one way to do that, but currently doesn't work technically, and looks a
>> bit weird syntactically. Perhaps some kind of region-definition could be a
>> first-class supported feature?
>>
> ​That'd be great, yes (and really easy to do using Parsoid's DOM) - we
> could do annotations, comments, content collapsing, etc. - but I can't see
> how it would work with wikitext in a way that would leave it
> sanely-editable for users. I'm not sure we want to start building features
> that only for work VisualEditor users at this point.
>

For the wikitext syntax, I'm not sure what the best approach is, but 
would some kind of start/end tag syntax work? I had in mind a 
region-annotation approach similar to either HTML or LaTeX: <region 
type="foo"></region> or that kind of thing. Where "foo" is the template 
(or some other kind of processor) it gets handed off to.

It wouldn't necessarily even have to be much different from what a 
{{foo-start}} and {{foo-end}} pair do currently, just the parent 
document needs some way of knowing that the pair create a region, 
whereas something like regions is currently implicitly created by 
unmarked pairs of start/end templates like {{hat}} / {{hab}} that 
generate fortuitously matching markup fragments.

-Mark