User talk:Ivan Shmakov

Welcome to Wikibooks, Ivan Shmakov!

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--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:19, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

Wiki markup
You were saying in the Assistance reading room, that you've been advocating "user-visble" markup. I'd be interested to know what sort of advocacy you've been doing. Generally taking opportunities to say things in favor of it, or have you put together some essay or something?

For my part, my vision is that wikis need expert tasks performed, and the exertise needed to do those things is a product of the wiki community, just as the information content of the wiki is a product of the community. So the expertise should be crowd-sourced, using wiki markup. The wiki community should decide who in the community are the experts, and should capture their expertise in a form so that it is preserved, and newcomers are helped to apply the exertise, and helped to learn it so that they become more expert themselves. Therefore, I've got a plan to provide a small set of wiki templates for creating interactive pages &mdash; tools for building interactive wizards using only wiki markup. So that a wiki community can evolve its own wizards, without ever having to use anything but wiki markup to do it. The tools themselves would use Javascript and Lua, but those who use the tools would never have to touch Lua or Javascript. Or PHP. Naturally, I expect to get no help from the WMF, so I've been writing these tools myself. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:52, 2 April 2014 (UTC)


 * The former. Alas, I’ve never written anything on that matter.


 * I don’t believe that the community could – or should – decide on who […] are the experts . The point is, – in the community of volunteers, there won’t necessarily be a substantial “workforce” to implement such decisions, even if some are made.  So I’d rather leave the question on the usual voluntocracy: let them who are currently active shape the project in the way they deem the best.  (Subject to the usual advice of the still active “experienced users”.)


 * As for the tools, it may be a good idea, but I don’t think I can say much about that without learning a fair share of the details. I think, however, that WMF may actually provide help here, at least in a form of some grant, provided that the rationale behind the work would be reasonably sound.


 * — Ivan Shmakov (d ▞ c) 16:51, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * What there is, atm, in the way of documentation on the tools is at n:Help:Wndialog. You can get a bit of a taste for the tools from that; but as for the potential of the tools, that takes either some imagination, or waiting until I've got more of the support infrastructure online.


 * The question of the community's ability to figure out who the experts are &mdash; that's a tricky point, not entirely dissimilar to things like fully protecting a template that's used on a million pages. As a practical matter, some resources can't be changed casually, and the community has to choose some individuals as caretakers who are deemed likely to be worthy of the trust.  How much 'caretaking' is needed is going to vary with circumstances.  It matters, unfortunately, that my current 'home' project is English Wikinews, where we've found it necessary to take the caretaking principle further than (I believe) any other Wikimedian project; and some folks (who, in my experience, don't really understand the implications) seriously resent us for it.  Anyway, the value of the tools I'm building is imho not in any way dependent on Wikinews &mdash; I expect they'd be hugely useful to Wikipedia, for example.  However, the fact that I'm a Wikinewsie means the WMF is pretty certain not to be supportive of anything I do.  (For example, the board of trustees recently went out of their way to refuse to support Wikinews in a way that wouldn't have cost them anything.)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 18:50, 5 April 2014 (UTC)