On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 10:01 PM, Dan Garry <[email protected]> wrote:
> My takeaway from this was that there are strong arguments both for and
> against keeping the representation of an article as a single blob of
> wikitext/HTML.
>
In the Architecture focus discussion, Krinkle, tgr, and others expressed a
more optimistic idea, that the wikitext of an article is "a sea of prose
with isles of non-prose content, which could come from structured data" [1].
I wasn't properly aware that the <graph> [2] and <templatedata> [3] parser
tags are examples of this already. Their content is highly structured and
VisualEditor or dedicated code can provide a specialized editor for it. If
you edit source of a wiki page containing them and garble their content,
you get a syntax warning or fail.
Wiki pages need more of these, <drumroll> Structure Content Blobs™ (or
sPage Components? anything but "widget"). Are they necessarily parser tags,
or is a parser function like {{#graph: *some parameters*}} equivalent?
To be concrete, does this mean the way forward for specifying lead images
[5] is a parser tag
<leadimage>{
"imagepage": "File:Einstein_1921_by_F_Schmutzer_-_restoration.jpg",
"focalarea": {"rect": [0.20, 0.20, 0.12, 0.12]}
}
</leadimage>
in wikitext, with a MediaWiki API to add this to a document and a WYSIWYG
property editor in VisualEditor for humans?
AIUI, the *Architecture focus 2015* document discusses this under
"Generalized transclusion" [4] and comments:
Over the next months, the MediaWiki developer community and staff should
investigate how the different transclusion mechanism used with wikitext
content can be unified and extended to work with non-wikitext content.
Exciting stuff.
[1]
https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2015/wikimedia-office.2015-06-24-21.04.log.html
starting at 21:21:05
[2] e.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo/Map?action=edit
[3] e.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Phabricator?action=edit
[4]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_focus_2015#General_architectural_concerns
[5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T91683
--
=S Page WMF Tech writer
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