Richard | 11 May 2012 08:17
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MediaWiki refactoring

I don't know if these are worth writing up formally, but I've been doing
a fair amount of work with MediaWiki lately and I've been refactoring
my content as it evolves.

Mostly the refactorings revolve around extracting templates from
similar pages in order to unify the presentation.  (In case you're
curious, it's the terminals wiki in my signature.)

For those not familiar with MediaWiki, templates are essentially a
mechanism for expanding boiler plate markup with named or positional
parameters.

So I've been doing "Extract Template" to provide boiler plate markup
shared among pages, or among other templates.

I've also noticed that in places where I need to repeat CSS style
attributes that "Extract CSS Class" would be useful.

There are other structural wiki changes that could be considered
refactorings because they don't change the content of the wiki, only
it's structural organization or presentation.  For instance, on my
wiki I have a page devoted to each terminal that is named in a
formulaic manner of "manufacturer model", so that all terminals from
the same manufacturer have the same prefix in the page name.  I use
categories to group all the terminals from a single manufacturer
together.

However, I have thought about changing the organization so that
manufacturers have a page and each terminal's page is a subpage of the
manufacturer's page.  This would give page names like mfr/model, but
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Gmane