Ray Saintonge wrote:
Ad 1: Most articles on animals use some kind of table, which is duplicated
for each article. Also, many articles may use the same references which are
duplicated on many pages. This is seen in a lot of other articles too and is
a huge waste of hard disk space and performance.
See [[Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life]]. The "Taxoboxes" provide a
taxonomical position for the life form under consideration, as well as a
list of the beings in the major rank immediately below it.
Yes, but I mean that there is a copy of this table used for *every* article,
which uses disk space. Normally, if you use a relational database you use a
reference to a table (the structure). The table template is stored only
once, only the field data (the content) is saved to disk and is unique for
every record.
Ad 2: when I
write many articles about closely related species, I may use
one article as a template and copy parts of it. If I discover a typo in this
copied part, I have to change it for each article by hand.
Another example would be if we decide to change the background colour of the
table used by most articles on animals. This may be no problem for a few
articles, yet with hundreds or thousands of articles it is a huge waste of
human resources.
The pink background colour is to indicate that we are dealing with an
animal species. Green is used for all plants. What colour change would
you be proposing.
It was only an example. I am quite happy with the pink colour. But imagine
that a few years from now the wikipedians decide it is better to use yellow,
or the text shouldn't be centered, or be bold or italic or... They would
have to alter the background colour for *every* table by hand, which may be
hundreds of thousends tables by then.
On the other hand, if you use one table as a template and derive all others
from it, you would only have to alter this one template table, you see? It
is a bit like "Styles" in MS Word, you define the style once and when you
change it, all text with this style is changed too. This may not be
important for a letter, but if you write a book with hundreds of pages, it
saves a huge amount of time.
The solution would probably be to use meta data.
I tried to discuss this on
wikipedia, but the discussion was moved to feature requests. An argument
against the use of meta data and templates was that it would make it harder
to contribute to wikipedia. An Argument which I do not really understand.
Please explain your use of meta data for this type of article.
I just think we should try to design a template for articles on animals (or
any other subject for that matter) with field like "scientific name", "
distribution" etc. If everyone would use this template it would be easier to
search certain patterns (which species lives in Africa? --> search the
distribution field) and to alter things (see above).
So my real questions are: who is currently
working on the database schema
for wikipedia and who decides if it would be useful to change this schema?
Go to the talk page for the above cited page.
I already tried that a few weeks ago and got no answer :-(
Cheers,
Jurriaan