Jurriaan Schulman wrote:
After writing some articles on animals I noticed two
things which I would
like to discuss. I would like to know how I can help to improve them.
1) wikipedia seems to duplicate a lot of information which could be avoided.
2) there currently seems to be no way to change information in more than one
article at once.
I would like to give a few examples to illustrate this:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Eclecticology