User:Sj/artofefficiency

General WP design
See User:EvanProdromou and wikitravel for better margin-navigation design. See Evan's page on wt for a concisely productive userpage.

Contextual Lists
Comment on VfD listing for MediaWiki:Religiousfigures:
 * There is surely a place for such dense contextual lists[CLs], for navigation, cleanup/parallelization, and organization of overview articles. Some people (I am among them) might wish to have at least one CL associated with every article, in addition to the links interleaved with the text.  Most of the complaints I see listed here could be addressed by better defining the purpose of the list (the average list starts life as a jumble of a few distinct lists which are unconsciously bundled together),  making it more comprehensive but at the same time less detailed, and perhaps applying it differently (not including it bodily as a sidebar).
 * where should good style and good interface design dictate such lists go? In a navbar along the side, top or bottom?  In a collapsible floating js box anchored to some corner of the reader's screen?  Hidden behind a "context" link for each article, perhaps with its own namespace?  ( a central concept such as "wristwatch" might have 5 different major context lists -- /time (concept)/, /tools/, /fashion/, /design (engineering)/, /social norms/ -- and a catalogue of minor ones -- /Dick Tracy gadgets/, /Douglas Adams vignettes/, &c. )
 * what guidelines should we use to quickly expand a necessarily-POV and often-vague start into a well-defined and uniformly-detailed list? How are these guidelines different from those for writing balanced articles?

Some examples...

Page UI Notions
Page design: collapsible / meshable. Talk design: threadable, filterable. History design: filterable, threadable. [vandalism should be out-of-thread; users should be allowed to identify edit threading, even if most don't] Feedback: to site maintainer, to editor, to page creator, to page 'owners' [anyone who wants that association with a page], to all page watchers [talk page... almost]. Contact: "email this user", "drop TALK note", ? toolboxes: ? todo lists: ? workspaces/sandboxes: ?

Interlang Links, Translation Coordination
(started on Iso's talk page.)

What I really was getting at w/ the interlang links is:
 * 1) the person making the link often makes small mistakes -- linking an adjective in en: to an adverb in de: or even to a noun; linking a political movement to a particular political group w/ similar name; etc.
 * 2) the translations need to somehow be kept up to date.
 * 3) some arts are pure translation -- ja: has no info (online, in its userbase) to reproduce the version in fr:, so it needs an expert fr:-->ja: translator to really get the target art right; a partial transl is good, but should somehow be noted as imperfect
 * 4) there's no way to request a translated art -- or to see that one exists in other langs for translation.

Potential Solutions

 * 1) an interlang "requested pages" special page, which provides some automated translation of each page name into your preferred language; it would be awesome to see that irony was a much-requested but absent page in es:, with a link to the es: page and one to possibly-matching en: and fr: pages.
 * 2) multi-lingual / synonym searching for a matching title, so you can say "search for all synonyms of 'cake'" or "search fo 'cake' in de: and fr:" and see how many possibly-related art titles exist.
 * 3) a translator project that works over major arts, from largest categories and most popular topics down, and tries to unify
 * 4) * category structure / distribution
 * 5) * category substructure / naming conventions
 * 6) * navigation and template structure
 * 7) * lang links [many arts are linked from en: when they are translated to a new lang, but if they are already in 4 langs, the other 3 langs don't get the new trans-lang link]
 * 8) * quality assurance (maintenance of lists of "partly-" and "barely-translated" arts to help translators who want to find arts for language copyediting)
 * 9) a lock-step 'recent changes' setup which makes merging the latest changes from a variety of langs easy.  For instance: Marilyn Monroe gets heavily updated, independently, in 4 langs.  A potential translator comes along... The following are answerable questions, particularly if we use en: as a lingua franca(sic) and accept piecemeal updating of the en: version to/from each other lang --
 * 10) * Who merges these updates?
 * 11) * When was the last time the various arts were unified?
 * 12) * What is the diff b/t the current rev and the last-unified rev, for en: and a given lang?
 * 13) * Is one lang particularly out of date?
 * 14) * Which translators / contributors were interested in this art at some point?
 * 15) More details on that last point:
 * 16) * Offer editors the option of saying "this version is synched with this other version (presumably across languages)", so that later one can look at the changes since last synch in each language, to speed merging of the updates.
 * 17) * Discussion with Brion on #mw today (+sj+ 10:40, 2004 Mar 17 (UTC)); "when PHP introduces an AI interface, I'll get right on it".

Current work
Is there already a project page about this? My lang skills are broad and poor, not good enough to spearhead any kind of translation, but I would be glad to sharpen them on such a project, half an hour at a time, and bet many other WPans would too. +sj+ 20:52, 2004 Mar 12 (UTC)


 * Here's a Sister projects proposals list, for coor'n with Wiktionary et al. (which could eventually include large corpuses of string-translations...? if they get their data model ironed out.)

Wiki Syntax, Markup
Meatball ideas | Restructured Text for Python (ca. 10/2002) | transclusion | Latex formatting extended to a variety of domains invoking external scripts (chemical structures/images, ascii/magic-eye art, &c.)