Suggestions for the ingredient wiki

I've been looking a bit on the ingredient wiki and thinking about how these entries could be better and I've come up with a couple of things that could make the ingredient wiki better and/or more inviting for users to edit.

First off, a markup reference or some sort of documentation on what kind of tags are supported for creating links/tables and so on. Having this would make it so much easier for a person to edit/add tables links and so on, as you wouldn't need to guess how the system works. A further improvement in this vein would be to have some sort of preview before you save your changes to the ingredient wiki.

I thought of this when I wanted to add some images (the conversion formulas) to the gelatin page and realized that I had no clue if it was possible to add a image tag and from inspecting a page I found that some sort of custom markup system was used (not phpbb style).

Another good feature to reduce unnecessary and duplicated entries from the wiki, would be the feature of adding synonyms or linking a page to another e.g. make "Apple" link to the more informative "Apples" page and even linking pages like "1/2 granny smith apple" to just show the apples page.

A wiki style notation that you've been redirected would fit nicely here and whenever somebody wants to expand a entry in a direction that is overly specific they could split it at that point from the master and have both articles link to each other. The linking after such a split would probably be manual, where the user is encouraged to add a short description and link and this encouragement can be shown in the same area where you have all the synonyms listed for a page.

One possible way of building the interface for this would be when in the edit mode, to have a section in the side pane where all synonyms of the current page are listed and a button which says "Mark this page as duplicate" which will ask you to give the name of the page which should supersede the current page. And when applied this will make the current page and any page marked as synonym be hidden and redirect to the superseding page, which will now have all these pages listed in its edit page. When removing a synonym from a page it would make sense to create a new tab where the user can create this page and this could be filled with whatever was in this page before it was marked as duplicate or just be a copy of the page it was removed from.

This is what I can think of for now.

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Comments

michaelnatkin

Hey @Sixten_26971 - thanks for the detailed feedback! As the main developer on that feature I couldn't agree more, I think you've nailed a lot of the things that would make it much more valuable. The reality is that we don't have the resources to invest deeply in the ingredient wiki right now, but I really look forward to the day when we can make it much better. The duplicate issue in particular wounds my soul..

Sixten_26971

I can see how the duplication issue can take time to implement, but as for the markup documentation that should be possible to get without too much work I think.

I have some ideas where such a reference could be put, depending on how many tags there are and how through you want to be in documenting them.

Put a short tag reference (only listing the general format of all/most tags) directly in the popup that appears when click the help button, when in the editing mode of a ingredient page.
Another way if you need too much space for it too fit nicely in that page you can either put a link in the existing help popup or create another popup with a label of "Formatting Help" or equivalent.

I don't think this type of documentation has to clear enough that a computer illiterate grandpa can understand, just something in style of the following should be enough:

"[link <url> <link text>] creates a link"

Looking a bit more at some ingredient pages I see that HTML seems to be used in them, if HTML is allowed and preferred, then this should be mentioned in the how to edit help, so that users know that html works and can look up what html tags they want to use. If limitations apply it would also be useful to mention those most likely to be encountered, e.g you might have a policy that you may only hotlink images from specific sites.

Another thing, when reading the "How to Edit" help text I see that it indicates that edits will be reviewed and I think it would be helpful for the reviewer if the user who makes a change could also fill in a comment field, which would be shown to the reviewer. This way a user can explain what the edit does or why it was needed. e.g. "Duplicate information in page" or "Wrong information see Wikipedia link"