Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Archive/Improve TemplateData to ease description of lexical items

Add links
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

Improve TemplateData to ease description of lexical items

Withdrawn by proposer [1]

  • Problem: Currently editing a Wiktionary article is difficult for new comers, as the structure of article is often rigid and heavily rely on many templates.
  • Who would benefit: Every contributor willing to change an article on a Wiktionary without having to cross a difficult learning curve or the need to often probe the documentation to remember how things are supposed to be wrote. Also, while suggestion made here are proposed with a clear goal, many other projects would probably benefit from this. Although, this result would not be expected as a direct result of the proposed solution, every Wiktionary version remaining free to use whatever they prefer, but at least it would make it possible.
  • Proposed solution: There is already a current work in progress attempt on the French Wiktionary to gather every data related to the same lexical item into a single template. So far it relies on a Scribunto module and a template using TemplateData. But TemplateData have currently several caveats which makes it far less practice:
    • there is no way to limit an entry to a given set, ever static or dynamic
      • a static list should not be that much difficult to implement, rendered as a dropdown list in the template edit popup
      • a dynamic list would be probably more difficult, but extremely useful
        • to avoid duplicate information like list of supported languages and their corresponding ISO code, which are already in a Scribunto module
        • even based on static list, it's interesting to be able to filter some entries, for example grammatical gender and number sets vary from one language to an other, once the user chose a language, only the relevant cases should be proposed
    • each field can be associated with a short descriptive help, but wikicode included in it won't be parsed, so it's impossible to add internal link to a documentation page covering the subject in depth
    • as far as the current above mentioned attempt goes, the template pop up editor of the visual editor is slow and don't display anything during loading, giving the impression that the page crashed or that nothing is happening
    • there is no way to properly manage numbered list, both intertwined and flat numbered list. For example definition.1.1.description might be used for describing the first subdefinition of the first definition. So far TemplateData require to explicit every single numbered parameter, so no generic parameter can be created to make a template scalable.
    • Improve VE editor for intertwinned templates. So far only the first level templates are editable with the TemplateData, templates which are called in template parameters are displayed as wikitext in each parameter value, with no way to deepen edition with new modals.
  • More comments:

Community discussion[edit]

Retrieved from "https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Community_Wishlist_Survey_2017/Archive/Improve_TemplateData_to_ease_description_of_lexical_items&oldid=18510583"