(Lying on the ground in the foetal position sobbing gently ... poor poor Wiksource, forgotten again.)
Wikisource - we have tried to get the source and structure by regulating the spaces that we can, however, formalising template fields to forms would be great ...
* extension for DynamicPageList (previously rejected) * search engines that work with transcluded text * extension for music notation (Lilypond?) * pdf text extraction tool to be implemented * good metadata & tools * bibliographic tools, especially tools that allow sister cross-references * book-making tools that work with transcluded text * tools that allow "What links here" across all of WMF ...
Hell, I could even see that text from WS references could be framed and transcluded to WP, and provide a ready link back to the works at the sites. Same for WQ to transclude quotes from a WS reference text, ready links from Wiktionary to usage in WS books. That should be the value of a wiki and sister sites.
Regards, Andrew
On 28 Dec 2010 at 9:27, Brion Vibber wrote:
On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 8:43 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
e.g. Wikia has WYSIWYG editing and templates. They have a sort of solution to template editing in WYSIWYG. It's not great, but people sort of cope. How did they get there? What can be done to make it better, *conceptually*?
What I'm saying there is that we don't start from the assumption that we know nothing and have to start from scratch, forming our answers only from pure application of personal brilliance; we should start from the assumption that we know actually quite a bit, if we only know who to ask and where. Does it require throwing out all previous work? etc., etc. And this is the sort of question that requires actual expense on resources to answer.
Given that considerable work has gone on already, what would we do with resources to apply to the problem?
My primary interest at the moment in this area is to reframe the question a bit; rather than "how do we make good WYSIWYG that works on the way Wikipedia pages' markup and templates are structured now" -- which we know has been extremely hard to get going -- to instead consider "how do we make good WYSIWYG that does the sorts of things we currently use markup and templates for, plus the things we wish we could do that we can't?"
We have indeed learned a *huge* amount from the last decade of Wikipedia and friends, among them:
- authors and readers crave advanced systems for data & format-sharing (eg
putting structured info into infoboxes) and interactive features (even just sticking a marker on a map!)
- most authors prefer simplicity of editing (keep the complicated stuff out
of the way until you need it)
- some authors will happily dive into hardcore coding to create the tools
they need (templates, user/site JS, gadgets)
- many other authors will very happily use those tools once they're created
- the less the guts of those tools are exposed, the easier it is for other
people to reuse them
The incredible creativity of Wikimedians in extending the frontend capabilities of MediaWiki through custom JavaScript, and the markup system through templates, has been blowing my mind for years. I want to find a way to point that creativity straight forward, as it were, and use it to kick some ass. :)
Within the Wikimedia ecosystem, we can roughly divide the world into "Wikipedia" and "all the other projects". MediaWiki was created for Wikipedia, based on previous software that had been adapted to the needs of Wikipedia; and while the editing and template systems are sometimes awkward, they work.
Our other projects like Commons, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and Wikinews have *never* been as well served. The freeform markup model -- which works very well for body text on Wikipedia even if it's icky for creating tables, diagrams and information sets -- has been a poorer fit, and little effort has been spent on actually creating ways to support them well.
Commons needs better tools for annotating and grouping media resources.
Wiktionary needs structured data with editing and search tools geared towards it.
Wikibooks needs a structure model that's based on groups of pages and media resources, instead of just standalone freetext articles which may happen to link to each other.
Wikiversity needs all those, and more interactive features and the ability for users to group themselves socially and work together.
Getting anything done that would work on the huge, well-developed, wildly-popular Wikipedia has always been a non-starter because it has to deal with 10 years of backwards-compatibility from the get-go. I think it's going to be a *lot* easier to get things going on those smaller projects which are now so poorly served that most people don't even know they exist. :)
This isn't a problem specific to Wikimedia; established organizations of all sorts have a very difficult time getting new ideas over that hump from "not good enough for our core needs" to "*bam* slap it everywhere". By concentrating on the areas that aren't served at all well by the current system, we can make much greater headway in the early stages of development; Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" calls this "competing against non-consumption".
For the Wikipedia case, we need to incubate the next generation of templating up to the point that they can actually undercut and replace today's wikitext templates, or I worry we're just going to be sitting around going "gosh I wish we could replace these templates and have markup that works cleanly in wysiwyg" forever.
My current thoughts are to concentrate on a few areas:
- create a widget/gadget/template/extension/plugin model built around
embedding blocks of information within a larger context... 2) ...where the data and rendering can be reasonably separate... (eg, not having to pull tricks where you manually mix different levels of table templates to make the infobox work right) 3) ...and the rendering can be as simple, or as fancy as complex, as your imagination and HTML5 allow.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l