Board Thread:New Features/@comment-24739709-20150518230347/@comment-4189499-20150611163912

Ohmystars wrote: Dessamator wrote: [T]he vast majority of wikis use templates with more/less the same structure. Character, Books, item, episode, event, and few others. They merely add/remove things from it. So converting some of the popular infoboxes in template.wikia would probably greatly reduce the trouble. Very few people will try to reinvent the wheel when it works very well already. You may be right. (As an aside: I myself never used any template from Templates Wiki. I always create them from scratch, but that's probably just me.) Thanks for pointing that out, but I don't see how that contradicts with my idea of a GUI tool. We could add the functionality within the GUI tool to load an existing template, i.e. Book template, and then the user can adjust some labels or rearrange the order of some fields, then generate the tags. I similarly start from scratch with templates, and didn't even know the templates wiki was a thing. Even with wikitext infoboxes in the past, I usually scrap the default code and start again with my own classes etc. But I understand that many admins don't want to do that. I think that most admins should learn how to make basic wikitext templates, but I understand the reality is that they won't.

The idea of making a tool which would simply add/remove data fields would probably solve most problems for admins editing infoboxes. It shouldn't be too hard to make in theory. The tool would put the basic structure in as default, with infobox, title, and image tags already set up. There would then be some sort of form where admins (or other users for that matter) could add extra fields, then fill in label, selector for filling in the information, and some sample data to show what the infobox would look like live. I've made a very rough mock-up in paint to show what I mean. The tool should allow people to drag data sets around as well as headings to fit their required layout, as well as delete data sets and heading they don't want. It would then be a really simple matter of generating the tags in the right order with the right data to make it work.