Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 8:16 PM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote:
snip
An idea that has been toyed with a couple of other places is to allow
defined blocks and references to them in article text. For example:
An article might start:
display name=infobox /
Thomas Jefferson was the third president...
and at the end of the article have:
define name=infobox
{{infobox
...
}}
/define
It would provide the flexibility to place items where needed in the
article while moving the complex wikicode into a separate segment
that's less likely to confuse novices. One could also call display
multiple times if there is an element (like a birth date) that needs
to be repeated in some awkward manner.
Returning to a chunk of discussion from last week...
I wrote code as Extension:DelayedDefinition that actually implements
the define and display system suggested previously. I'm not sure
the WMF editing communities would actual want to go this way though.
It's a pretty drastic step from the point of wikicode layout and a
good WYSIWYG would be a better long-term solution to the same problem,
so it may have been something of an academic exercise.
Also, there is an enormous hack in the middle of it where it makes a
recursive call to Parser::parse (labeled with screaming comments). I
realize doing that is the height of all evil, but the existing
recursiveTagParse, Hooks, and similar don't actually seem to offer
enough control to make this work properly. So, if someone were ever
to actually consider this for production use, the parser would
probably need to be patched to allow a more appropriate solution.
-Robert Rohde
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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
2009/7/1 Robert Rohde raro...@gmail.com: An idea that has been toyed with a couple of other places is to allow defined blocks and references to them in article text. For example: An article might start: display name=infobox / Thomas Jefferson was the third president... This is a marvellous idea, and presumably a lot of the code for it is already in existence (what with ref etc). It'd also solve the issue with people wanting to templatise content such as infoboxes in order to reduce the clutter on a specific page. Can anyone see any obvious downsides? -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org wrote:
As many folks have noted, our current templating system works ok for
simple things, but doesn't scale well -- even moderately complex
conditionals or text-munging will quickly turn your template source into
what appears to be line noise.
In addition to changing the programming language that is used in the
template namespace a lot of progress can be made on the readability of
articles (and thus how usable they are) by rethinking how we invoke
templates, or rather how we make data available to templates.
If you look at the George W. Bush article you see that the first 50
lines of the article are template code and that his birthday is
declared multiple times like so:
|birth_date={{birth date and age|mf=yes|1946|7|6}}
born July 6, 1946
|DATE OF BIRTH=July 6, 1946
Editors clearly need a better system for declaring facts about
articles and then using them in advanced template programming. One can
imagine an alternate system where his birthday is only declared once,
like so, in the article text: born on [[birthday::July 6, 1946]]. And
so on for all the other facts listed in his infobox. Rather than
declaring them explicitly in the infobox, you declare them explicitly
inline in the text in a highly readable format.
Then there is the issue of calling templates. Where do you place them
within the article? Much like MediaWiki itself I suggest we introduce
the notion of hooks. Beginning of article, end of article. Beginning
of section, end of section. Beginning of paragraph end of paragraph.
Template programmers can use these hooks to inject data that is
declared explicitly in the article into various points of the article.
This can be thought of as a separation of content and presentation.
Articles have the constraint that their source code must, under all
circumstances, be highly readable to our visitors. That way our
visitors might become encyclopedia writers! Associated with those
articles is another page where users can control higher level
organizations of the content in the body of text. They can format it
in infobox style, process it any way they like using our new
programming language, and place it in a variety of locations
throughout the article without sacrificing the readability of the
wikitext at all.
It will take a little bit more conceptual work to handle all cases,
such as inline references, etc.., etc... But the bottom line is that
the source code to articles on Wikipedia has become so complicated
that it is now too difficult for reasonable people to consider
editing. One user said that adding a new programming language to
MediaWiki is totally orthogonal to the method that we use to pass data
to those programs, or the context in which those programs are called.
I couldn't disagree more - one of the major reasons Wikipedia is so
unreadable today is because of the way we call templates from
articles. From the bottom of the design to the top, it needs to be
rethought. I believe that this conversation should be held far beyond
wikitech-l and should be made available to subscribers of almost all
of our lists and also the large pool of contributors. One of the
reasons that we ended up with ParserFunctions is that very few people
were involved in the conversation. Do we even understand the problem
that needs to be solved? I am not convinced that it has been
adequately characterized.
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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
2009/7/1 Brian brian.min...@colorado.edu: Editors clearly need a better system for declaring facts about articles and then using them in advanced template programming. One can imagine an alternate system where his birthday is only declared once, like so, in the article text: born on [[birthday::July 6, 1946]]. And so on for all the other facts listed in his infobox. Rather than declaring them explicitly in the infobox, you declare them explicitly inline in the text in a highly readable format. That's the idea behind Semantic MediaWiki. What are the chances of getting that implemented on the Wikimedia wikis? (That's a very different discussion to the one we're having here, though.) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Brianbrian.min...@colorado.edu wrote:
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:16 AM, Brion Vibberbr...@wikimedia.org wrote:
As many folks have noted, our current templating system works ok for
simple things, but doesn't scale well -- even moderately complex
conditionals or text-munging will quickly turn your template source into
what appears to be line noise.
In addition to changing the programming language that is used in the
template namespace a lot of progress can be made on the readability of
articles (and thus how usable they are) by rethinking how we invoke
templates, or rather how we make data available to templates.
If you look at the George W. Bush article you see that the first 50
lines of the article are template code and that his birthday is
declared multiple times like so:
|birth_date={{birth date and age|mf=yes|1946|7|6}}
born July 6, 1946
|DATE OF BIRTH=July 6, 1946
Editors clearly need a better system for declaring facts about
articles and then using them in advanced template programming. One can
imagine an alternate system where his birthday is only declared once,
like so, in the article text: born on [[birthday::July 6, 1946]]. And
so on for all the other facts listed in his infobox. Rather than
declaring them explicitly in the infobox, you declare them explicitly
inline in the text in a highly readable format.
Then there is the issue of calling templates. Where do you place them
within the article? Much like MediaWiki itself I suggest we introduce
the notion of hooks. Beginning of article, end of article. Beginning
of section, end of section. Beginning of paragraph end of paragraph.
Template programmers can use these hooks to inject data that is
declared explicitly in the article into various points of the article.
This can be thought of as a separation of content and presentation.
Articles have the constraint that their source code must, under all
circumstances, be highly readable to our visitors. That way our
visitors might become encyclopedia writers! Associated with those
articles is another page where users can control higher level
organizations of the content in the body of text. They can format it
in infobox style, process it any way they like using our new
programming language, and place it in a variety of locations
throughout the article without sacrificing the readability of the
wikitext at all.
It will take a little bit more conceptual work to handle all cases,
such as inline references, etc.., etc... But the bottom line is that
the source code to articles on Wikipedia has become so complicated
that it is now too difficult for reasonable people to consider
editing. One user said that adding a new programming language to
MediaWiki is totally orthogonal to the method that we use to pass data
to those programs, or the context in which those programs are called.
I couldn't disagree more - one of the major reasons Wikipedia is so
unreadable today is because of the way we call templates from
articles. From the bottom of the design to the top, it needs to be
rethought. I believe that this conversation should be held far beyond
wikitech-l and should be made available to subscribers of almost all
of our lists and also the large pool of contributors. One of the
reasons that we ended up with ParserFunctions is that very few people
were involved in the conversation. Do we even understand the problem
that needs to be solved? I am not convinced that it has been
adequately characterized.
I'm not sure how one would make your hook system work in a way that
was practical and not totally opaque to the editor.
An idea that has been toyed with a couple of other places is to allow
defined blocks and references to them in article text. For example:
An article might start:
display name=infobox /
Thomas Jefferson was the third president...
and at the end of the article have:
define name=infobox
{{infobox
...
}}
/define
It would provide the flexibility to place items where needed in the
article while moving the complex wikicode into a separate segment
that's less likely to confuse novices. One could also call display
multiple times if there is an element (like a birth date) that needs
to be repeated in some awkward manner.
There is actually code lying around somewhere that implements such a
system for ref so that the first call would not need to attach the
full reference definition but could simply use ref name=foo / if a
corresponding ref_define name=foo.../ref appeared later in the
text.
Personally, my guess is that a system of placement by reference would
make for a more flexible / less confusing approach than trying to
create a system of article hooks and attach infoboxes and the like to
them.
-Robert Rohde
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Re: [Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] On templates and programming languages
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 9:16 PM, Robert Rohderaro...@gmail.com wrote:
I'm not sure how one would make your hook system work in a way that
was practical and not totally opaque to the editor.
An idea that has been toyed with a couple of other places is to allow
defined blocks and references to them in article text. For example:
An article might start:
display name=infobox /
Thomas Jefferson was the third president...
and at the end of the article have:
define name=infobox
{{infobox
...
}}
/define
It would provide the flexibility to place items where needed in the
article while moving the complex wikicode into a separate segment
that's less likely to confuse novices. One could also call display
multiple times if there is an element (like a birth date) that needs
to be repeated in some awkward manner.
There is actually code lying around somewhere that implements such a
system for ref so that the first call would not need to attach the
full reference definition but could simply use ref name=foo / if a
corresponding ref_define name=foo.../ref appeared later in the
text.
Personally, my guess is that a system of placement by reference would
make for a more flexible / less confusing approach than trying to
create a system of article hooks and attach infoboxes and the like to
them.
Placement by reference aka move all the nasty stuff to the bottom :p
I think this approach would be good combined with the ability to
declare facts ala `born on [[birthday::July 6, 1946]]'. That way we no
longer have nasty stuff at all - we simply reference a template such
as display name=infobox / which gets its arguments from the facts
declared in the article which called it.
The method of declaring facts in wikilinks is indeed derived from
semantic mediawiki. But I just look at it as a testbed for good ideas,
not as an extension for WMF to install.
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