[Wikipedia-l] Wikification function proposal

[Brion L. VIBBER]

On mer, 2002-02-27 at 13:30, Magnus Manske wrote:
> The functions that could be performed (and that I can think of) are:
> 
> 1. Replacement of HTML tags by wiki tags (namely, "<b>" and "<i>", maybe
> "<h1>" as well)
> 2. Eliminating links to redirect pages by changing the link in question to
> the target of the redirect

Hmm, maybe. Sometimes redirects are wrong, though!

> 3. Marking [broken links]] and [[more broken links]
> 4. Optimizing external links with too many [] (like
> [[http://www.google.com]])

Question: why do we have the separate forms [X] for external links and
[[X]] for internal links? Unless we're going to add http:, ftp:, news:
or mailto: namespaces, I don't see much possibility of conflict.

There may be good historical reasons I am not aware of.

> 5. Optimizing [[link|links]] to [[link]]s

Please don't! Not only is the result very ugly, but it would lead to
inconsistent link appearance for irregular and regular plurals
([[foot|feet]] vs [[hand]]s), never mind the issue of other languages.

> 6. Removing [[Talk:thispage|Talk]] links (at the end of the page)
> 
> I am sure you can think of some more details that have always bugged you,
> but that were (be themselves) not important enough to call for a function;)
> 
> We could use this for rather fancy things as well:
> 
> 7. In the preview, mark words (or word combinations) that are currently
> plain text, but that do exist as a topic in the database (to find pages one
> could link to).
> 8. In the preview, mark all numbers that could be dates (more link
> candidates).
> 9. Automatically put the title phrase in bold if it appears in the first
> paragraph.

This would be even more fun if we had a WYSIWIG editor. Just think of
all the myriad colors and wavy underlines and mysterious icons we could
bedazzle the poor confused users with! Or, wait, were we supposed to be
*nice* to the users? :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)