Proposal talk:Foundations for Interactive Articles

Please provide a description of and/or link to the UVA ICPC system. 75.55.199.5 02:20, 16 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:09, 3 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Good Idea - needs to be done carefully

as outlined in Proposal_talk:Text_or_Syntax_driven_Charts,_Diagrams,_Graphs_and_more and Proposal_talk:Inline_SVG_preference, there are two risks that need to be mitigated:

the provision of animations capability must not turn wiki-markup into a full-blown programming language. end-users have enough problem with the advanced capabilities of wiki-markup language as it is.
the provision of animations capability must not assume that all browsers are capable of displaying "SVG". the consequences are that an abstraction layer is required such that the markup is translated on a per-browser basis; VML for IE and SVG for all other modern browsers; fall-back option must be librsvg - static images with a javascript-driven timer to step through animations (or provide a "Next animation" / "Previous animation" button)

overall i very much like the idea of interactive articles: it just needs to be done in a way that fulfils the goals of the wikipedia charter, by making it easy for anyone to view and contribute, using pretty much any (reasonable) device. Lkcl 16:37, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Examples of how Interactive Articles should not be done

the recommendation that wikimedia articles are allowed to be written in programming languages is just so at odds with the idea of a user-contributable world-wide encyclopedia that it is difficult to comprehend why the authors of these proposals made their recommendations. the elitism that these proposals represent, one of which is even in a programming language that requires a proprietary development environment, is just staggering.

if wikipedia is to increase its reach to emerging countries and to the third world, the use of software which will increase the cost of the hardware required, not to mention result in significant energy consumption, is unacceptable. The recently announced Wikireader is a perfect example of why it is an incredibly bad idea to force putting overbloated software solutions (java, flash) onto devices: the Wikireader takes only two AAA batteries that can last up to a year, and yet it can hold over 3 million wikipedia articles (including images), on a single 4gb SD card. keep java and flash away from wikipedia. Lkcl 16:50, 14 October 2009 (UTC)[reply]