User:Driftingdrifting
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Things I'm Working On
I've been on-and-off making small edits to the wiki for probably something like 20 years on IPs and accounts that I have long lost but I've never been a focused or consistent editor. Very open to feedback or a handslap if warranted. I created this account to be a more active editor. I've been recently enjoying anti-vandalism and link cleanup as well.
 | This user is a recent changes patroller. |
Undeveloped Thoughts on Wikipedia
Stubs of thoughts or ideas that I want to develop or talk myself out of and abandon when I have more time to think. If you have thoughts on any of this, feel free to share!
Structured Data Support
I believe Wikipedia badly needs actual support for structured data associated with articles. Like it or not, en-wiki is littered with structured data in the form of infoboxes, charts, and other increasingly complicated templates. Because we are awkwardly forcing structured data into non-structured place (wiki markdown), we're just making our lives needlessly difficult. We end up with 101 different ways to represent structured data and complicated lua and bots trying to help us jamb a square peg into a round hole.
This structured data ends up being difficult to edit correctly in source, and sometimes hard-to-impossible to edit in the visual UI. With html (and markdown) literacy falling in the general population, we are increasingly limiting ourselves to a small set of editors that can actually maintain these things. It makes diffs hard to read. We also make it harder on ourselves to catch and correct subtle vandalism and accidental inconsistencies. If we settled on a way to handle structured data, we could create better editing tools, better helpers, better bots. My two cents is that the (rather animated) past discussions on Wikidata and how it was introduced to the community have unfortunately poisoned this conversation a little bit and that it conflates two related but separate topics: "Should en-wiki have a way to handle structured data" and "should Wikidata be that solution" are in my mind two very separate questions. I do tend to agree with the folks that feel that the governance and project goal differences between en-wiki and wikidata make it not a great option for us, but I don't want the conversation to end there. Structured data under the editorial control of the en-wiki community and admins is not an impossible goal, and I would love to try to build some consensus on what that could look like and how we take baby steps in that direction.
UX
I believe many of Wikipedia's issues and difficulties with new editors are solvable with UX.