[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

Tue Oct 5 14:23:33 UTC 2010

On 5 October 2010 13:39, <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:

> In a message dated 10/5/2010 6:01:14 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
> jayen466 at yahoo.com writes:
>
>
> > You're right there. It's a bloody headache finding the words of the
> > article in amongst all the citation templates when you're trying to edit.
> >>
>
>
>
> That however really isn't a fault that can be laid at the feet of the
> citation method (inline), but rather perhaps at the feet of the editor
> program.
>
> It has been discussed before, that it might be helpful should we have a way
> to splice apart the content from the format.  Vanilla HTML does not do that
> at all, but other competing editors can and do.  Some steps in that
> direction have been taken already with the newer upgrade, but not all, in
> particular the templates.  Perhaps this is an opportunity.
>
> W.
>

One of the things that the Usability team is working on is the idea of
"template folding" - as discussed here:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/04/template-folding/ Indeed, I suspect
that one of the main reasons for moving to the iFrame editing window system
with the Vector skin was to enable this kind of thing. (unfortunately the
test environment for this feature that is referred to in the blogpost is
currently broken).

I for one am really looking forward to this usability enhancement rolling
out as it a brilliant way of hiding away all the code elements from people
when they first click "edit" but not breaking any of the actual
functionality that makes wikipedia templates so powerful. This "folding"
idea is also intended to be combined with "form based editing" which will
enable people to not only open up the template in the normal way but also in
a way that shows the template parameters in a human-readable popup box which
you can then edit.

-Liam