On the non-VE front, this sounds a lot like the use case of method
name completion in an IDE.
Maybe the usability of non-VE editing would be improved if we
basically made an IDE, with syntax highlighting (I guess people have
already done that with WikiEd), and auto-completion, where the moment
you type "{{a", there's a tool tip immediately above suggesting the
most common template names starting with the letter a, and getting
more specific as you type, and similar for parameters.
Of course when we start looking at programming tools for usability
suggestions, this strongly suggests our tools are not open to the
"average" individual. :s
On the more general front. Often I see people bashing templates for
how convoluted they are, and how horrible they are. Which fair enough,
they do scare people. But I think its important to remember how great
they are too, and that there is a reason they are popular. Instead of
designing systems meant to be take they crapiness out of templates, we
should have the mental model of designing systems that have all the
good things that made templates so popular, but also happens to not
suck. On the other hand, that type philosophic sentiment doesn't
actually solve the problem, and I don't have any great ideas about it.
--
bawolff
On 6/16/15, Amir E. Aharoni <[email protected]> wrote:
> The first problem I always think about is figuring out which template to
> insert - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T55590
>
> Template parameter insertion works mostly fine if TemplateData is defined.
> This requires some effort from the community, but it's reasonable. But the
> editor always has to type the template name, and this means that the editor
> needs to know all the available templates. Needless to say, there are
> thousands of them in the active wikis. Some kind of a template picker would
> be a Very Big Nice-to-Have.
>
> A wider problem is that templates do A LOT of very different things, which
> could be (very roughly) grouped into several types:
> * talk page templates (different for user talk and article talk)
> * article tags - {{unreferenced}}, {{Expert-subject}}, etc.
> * inline tags - {{citation needed}}, {{who}}
> * infoboxes
> * inline content - IPA, unit conversion
> * block content - {{Quote}}
>
> Talk page templates should be largely irrelevant for VisualEditor
> development, although they should inform Flow development.
>
> Article-level tags should become page metadata and taken out of the page's
> code. (Done well, this could be a boost to editor engagement by helping get
> subject experts to take care of problematic content in a way that is better
> organized than the current backlog categories... but I digress.) Something
> similar should be done for inline tags like {{citation needed}}, although I
> don't see a way to separate them from the page's code.
>
> Infoboxes should be migrated as much as possible to Wikidata; ideally, they
> shouldn't be in the page's code either.
>
> This leaves us with inline content and block content. This is a mix between
> visual formatting and semantic markup. Largely, the editing communities
> have done a pretty good job at maintaining it the way they need it for
> their projects, but unfortunately the implementation is different in every
> language. A coordinated effort to find common templates that all projects
> need and integrating their insertion in a smoother way would be great. This
> was more or less with citations, and it can and should be done for other
> areas.
>
> As James said in the MediaWiki summit 2015, "global everything" :)
>
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> “We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
>
> 2015-06-16 12:53 GMT+03:00 Derk-Jan Hartman <[email protected]>:
>
>>
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-December/063225.html
>>
>> I just found back this post by David Gerard from 2010 and was struck by
>> how dead-on the discussion and analysis was and how far we have actually
>> come with VE 5 years later, even though we still did not pass the finish
>> line just yet.
>>
>> Also interesting is some of the follow up to it, which points out that
>> the
>> usability of Templates is also a real problem in itself, not easily
>> solvable with WYSIWYG, but probably just as important.
>>
>> I think VE is really close now to being usable in production, but I think
>> that we are FAR from done on this front. Like was stated, templates are a
>> real problem. A UI problem, and one that VE doesn't really solve. Citoid
>> sort of does, but just for one small subset of templates.
>>
>> I think it is important to remember that VE is a framework. The piece
>> that
>> will open up other possibilities, but that we will need to still do a lot
>> of work to find what those possibilities are, how they can make page and
>> article authoring more usable etc...
>>
>> The post starts with a quote of Fred Bauder: "There has to be a vision
>> though"
>>
>> So I'm asking: What is the vision for this next step ?
>> - What ideas do people have with regard to usability and templates.
>> - What examples of good editors can we find that also deal with
>> templates/objects etc.
>> - What are our unique challenges ?
>> - What kind of research and development would be needed to deliver this ?
>>
>> I would love it if we could end up with a discussion and summary as we
>> had
>> back then. A guide for us towards solving this next problem within
>> another
>> 5 years. We and the WMF can probably not start on this tomorrow, but we
>> can
>> start thinking about it.
>>
>> DJ
>>
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>>
>>
>
--
--
- Brian
Caution: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85
million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.
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