Mailing List Archive

Wiki newbie
Hello everyone,


Please allow me to introduce myself, my name is Leonardo and I'm a
contributor to the Spanish Wikipedia.

I've joined this list some days ago since I want to contribute to wiki
software, specially to the Spanish encyclopedia implementation of it.

So, without any further formalities, here's a list of things I wanted to
ask you guys.


* How are u doing? :)

* Ok, I understand the English Wikipedia made a transition to a new
software written in PHP. Do I have to wait too long before I see the
transition to the new software on the international wikipedias?

* Can I get the new software sources? Where?

* About the handling of bugs and feature requests, I think Bugzilla is a
great idea. I, for one, would rely on it heavily to make contributions
to the project.


So, I guess what I'm trying to tell you is, is it a good idea if I work
on the old (perl) wiki software? or should I wait for the PHP wiki?..
bear in mind that I'm mostly interested in the improvement of the
Spanish Wikipedia (although, if I can contribute to other projects in
the process, and eventually make the world a better place, I won't get
mad :)


Personally, I have a couple of ideas I'd like to implement on the wiki
software:

(a) A new, easier(?) way to create tables inside wiki pages. I
understand that some time ago, somebody wanted to do something like this
with vertical bars (`|'):

http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/How_does_one_edit_a_page/Old+version
(near the bottom of the page)

I wouldn't implement this feature in the same way (I don't even
understand it completely!), but basically I want to create an
alternative method to include tables in the encyclopedia without HTML.

(b) Ok, I know this may sound like pure evil, but I think that Wikipedia
could use some javascript on the editing pages (action=edit).

And before you start throwing sharpened things in my direction, please
let me expand my argument.

Wikipedia is a great tool, and it's certainly very easy to edit pages
and contribute to the project, but a plain <textarea> box is an arguably
limited widget. Now, I'm not saying this is a critical issue. It works,
and it works pretty darn good, but maybe we could take advantage of some
tools that would improve the editing experience (wow, I sound like a
marketroid :-).

Granted, this may be about just pure eye-candy stuff, and it may piss
off many javascript haters. But please remember that (1) it could be
implemented carefully, so it doesn't break anything on any browser, and
remain standards-compliant, and (2) it could be an optional feature, so
in case your head aches every time you see a <script> tag, you could
just turn it off.

Well, so what can Javascript do for us on the editing pages? I can think
of the following uses right now:

- A collection of buttons that allow you to insert special symbols
easily (like a character map, right there beside your editing box)

- A collection of buttons that insert special tags quickly. For example,
if I press a button labeled "strike out", I get the "<strike></strike>"
tags inserted in my text right away.

- A "Preview" area, updated immediately every time I type a character.

I know these are just lame examples, but I guess you get the idea.


----

So, in conclusion, I'm just another guy that wants to contribute with
the Wikipedia Project. Hopefully I'll manage to start coding a lot more
than talking real soon... :)


Thanks,


Leonardo Boshell
Re: Wiki newbie [ In reply to ]
From: "Leonardo Boshell" <p@kapcoweb.com>
>
> So, I guess what I'm trying to tell you is, is it a good idea if I work
> on the old (perl) wiki software? or should I wait for the PHP wiki?..

Since the PHP wiki will very probably replace the Perl software everywhere
your work on the Perl script will be lost then.

> bear in mind that I'm mostly interested in the improvement of the
> Spanish Wikipedia (although, if I can contribute to other projects in
> the process, and eventually make the world a better place, I won't get
> mad :)

At the moment the idea is to have eventually the same script for all
languages. So if you want to add something that is language dependent you
have to do it in a way that makes either appopriate for all languages or
easily adaptable (by, say, changing a certain include).

> Personally, I have a couple of ideas I'd like to implement on the wiki
> software:
>
> (a) A new, easier(?) way to create tables inside wiki pages. I
> understand that some time ago, somebody wanted to do something like this
> with vertical bars (`|'):
>
> http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/How_does_one_edit_a_page/Old+version
> (near the bottom of the page)
>
> I wouldn't implement this feature in the same way (I don't even
> understand it completely!), but basically I want to create an
> alternative method to include tables in the encyclopedia without HTML.

Frankly, I'm not a big fan of adding any more mark-up at the moment. The
parser is still a mess, needs optimization and we don't have an exact formal
description of how the syntax looks and what it does. Once we have those
things, we can start thinking about changing the mark-up.

> Granted, this may be about just pure eye-candy stuff, and it may piss
> off many javascript haters. But please remember that (1) it could be
> implemented carefully, so it doesn't break anything on any browser, and
> remain standards-compliant, and (2) it could be an optional feature, so
> in case your head aches every time you see a <script> tag, you could
> just turn it off.

We have not been very succesful at "careful implementing" sofar. :-/ And (2)
is really not a very good argument. You have seen how many options we have
already. Also in this respect we have to keep things as simple as possible.

> - A collection of buttons that allow you to insert special symbols
> easily (like a character map, right there beside your editing box)

Could be useful, but how many people who want to type Spanish don't have a
Spanish key board or have some short-cuts for Spanish letters?

> - A "Preview" area, updated immediately every time I type a character.

So you are going to write another version of the parser in Javascript? Two
versions of the parser in different languages doesn't seem very maintainable
to me.

Perhaps I sound a bit grumpy, but there is still an awfull lot of work that
needs to be done. We need a formal description of the mark-up. We need a
better parser. We need a better organization of the code and a
well-understood architecture for the internationalization. We need to get
rid of the current long list of bugs. Et cetera. What we do not need is more
and more and more features that make the script harder to maintain and bring
it closer to feature-death.

-- Jan Hidders