On 08/12/2015 09:33 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:
On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Gabriel Wicke <gwicke@wikimedia.org mailto:gwicke@wikimedia.org> wrote:
TL;DR: Join us to discuss Templates, Page Components & editing on Thu, 13 August, 12:45 – 14:00 PDT [0].I can't, so I'll just comment here.
including a talk by C.Scott at Wikimania [4]Looking at the slide deck, it's not terribly clear to me what's going on through much of it. If you're only referring to the "alternatives to templates" section (slides 39-50) it's good, but much of the rest isn't so much.
If you are able to look past the WATs (a lot of language implementations have those .. and in a few years, maybe someone will make a Parsoid WAT talk .. all par for the course), I think it was meant to present some of the known problems with wikitext (which you seemed to agree with) and use that as a jumping off point to talk about solutions to that .... mostly as a survey of all the ideas that have been floating around, not so much as: this is how we should do things. So, yes, some will prove to be unviable, etc.
But, it is meant as a conversation starter where we have all the pieces in one place rather than going hunting around 10 different wiki pages, phab tasks, email threads, whatever.
* What are the requirements for editing, RL module / metadata aggregation, dependency tracking?I don't think anyone will forget it, but keeping the links tables (dependency tracking) up to date is important. Flow did forget, for a historical example, and the current implementation still leaves a bit to be desired. Flow's watchlist and history mechanisms (e.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Web_APIs_hub&action=his... and how it shows on my watchlist) are rather lacking, too.
When discussing editing: A good WYSIWYG experience is essential, but a fully-featured markup editor (that ideally doesn't require directly writing JSON blobs or complex RDF structures) would also be very useful for many editors.
I agree that the requirement for a good markup editor is not going away. So, yes, that is part of the discussion, but this is mostly to highlight that markup editing is not the only editing mode that needs support and we need to think about what needs fixing so WYSIWYG experience is not hobbled.
* Should we evolve wikitext templates into well-formed page components?Probably not. While templates are used to implement "well-formed page components" as it seems to be defined here, they're also used for many other things.
I think the answer is probably more complex than that.
A lot of template are already, today, behave like well-formed page components. However, the parsers don't know that. They have to treat all templates with the same conservative brush. Even if we start coming up with ways of identifying such templates and enforcing their well-formedness, we will have made a fair amount of progress. There are various ways to go about that, and those details are something worth talking about.
As for the others, I think the page components for infoboxes, navboxes, wikidata-widgets, etc. will have taken a big bite out of other kinds of templates. And, for the rest, we can talk about leaving current default behavior as is and the implications, or talk about other solutions to deal with those.
So, maybe a rephrasing of that question would be: "What mechanisms can we evolve for using wikitext templates as well-formed page components?" which can be a good stepping stone forward without having to solve everything at once.
Subbu.