Original Suggestion and Discussion
Thanks for this wonderful site. I've been working on adding hyperlinked transcripts and I would like to be able to transclude certain sections of the transcript to the source citation on my people pages, including the hyperlinks. An extension exists to allow for this Extension:Labeled_Section_Transclusion which is supported in version 1.7 of MediaWiki, but it does not appear to be installed. Could you please install it? I have tested <onlyinclude> (and it works fine) but it is limited in only allowing one use per page. I am hoping to use this extension repeatedly in the transcripts. Regards, --Cos1776 18:38, 24 September 2011 (EDT)
- Before there is a discussion about adding features to transclusion, I believe there is a need to provide guidelines for transclusion in the first place. I have seen transclusion used on WeRelate and believe it is inappropriate on general WeRelate pages. It couples the pages too tightly so that changes to one page can have unexpected impact on other pages, probably unknown to the person doing the editing. This recently happened when a user did a merge combining two different narratives, one of which was being transcluded to other pages. The result of the merge caused additional text to be added to the narrative, so that now more text was transcluded than was originally intended, and it also caused unwanted changes to the formatting of it. I believe transclusion should be limited to templates, templates being designed to be included on multiple pages. Person and Family pages are written with a more limited perspective, with little thought given to how coherently they would look if transcluded to another page. So I think transclusion should have very limited use.
- Possibly one approach would to structure the first paragraph of the narrative as transcludable. For example, the way wikpedia entries use the opening section as a brief summary written with the idea that it could be transcluded. Then transclusion of that Person would only take that summary paragraph. Of course, few of the 2 million pages have been set up that way so far. So alternately, transclusion of Family and Person pages could be discouraged altogether.
- Possibly Transcript: pages wouldn't cause such a problem. But then, the details of the extension above may need to be explored. For example, what if 10 family members each want to transclude a different section of a Transcript page, how would that work? Do 10 different, possibly overlapping, sections have to be defined in the Transcript: page? How messy would that get? At what point does this get ridiculous, like say a transcript of Savage with each subject wanting to be a different section? (Remembering, of course, that it is always possible to add links to other WeRelate pages and so lead readers to them by reference, instead of by transclusion. There is a WR_A tag to add pretty precise targets that these links can jump to.) --Jrich 15:25, 25 September 2011 (EDT)
Admin Follow Up (Oct 2016)
Hopefully, not a conflict of interest that I am now reviewing my own suggestion... This is unresolved, but I have learned to work around this need, so I will withdraw this request for now. --cos1776 17:11, 31 October 2016 (UTC)
(This Suggestion will be moved to the archive if no response or objection is received within 10 days.)
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