https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6455
--- Comment #116 from Ted Kandell <[email protected]> 2010-11-21 02:18:18 UTC --- I would like to add a concrete example to this debate, an actual use case. Many entries in Wikipedia describe some sort of phylogenetic data, from genealogies, to the phylogenies of language families, to Y and mitochondrial DNA haplogroups. A standard way of representing such trees is through the Newick format: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newick_format There are all sorts of template hacks in Wikipeida to represent family trees, genetic trees, language families, and all sorts of other related information. Wouldn't it be better to just add the standard Newick format tree representation to articles, and then use templates to display the data in various sorts of ways? The fundamental information would then be preserved in a standardized display-independent format. Also there are a large number of tools out there that can generate graphic images based on the Newick format. It isn't very difficult to parse a Newick format string and create a basic tree display template from it. However, all this really would need is a full set of string functions. It's true that PHP and MediaWiki wasn't designed to be a kind of parser or compiler, but what sort of alternative can anyone think of? Should we put in a request for MediaWiki developers to support the Newick format, and any number of other important display-independent representations of data widely used in Wikipedia? Who decides, and who does the work? There is a good argument to "doing it right" and implementing a full scripting language (aside from Javascript?) but in the meantime, all sorts of important data that can't quite be represented as text is being added to Wikipedia in the form of templates. How can all the various sorts of tree data now in Wikipedia be extracted - or just redisplayed using whatever new and better display template comes along? I don't know if this can be added as a "bug" in and of itself, but it it does point out the fundamental problem. MediaWiki has text, graphic, audio, and video formats, but is missing the ability to parse certain other critical basic information storage formats that the developers never considered. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
