User:djd/projects/MedNav

For a preview of draft work in progress, see:
Project sandbox page: User:Djd/sandbox/MedNav/Project

Greetings!

Though I may be a new user, here, I'm a longtime Wikipedia reader. I have been using Wikipedia for years as a starting point for research, but have always taken it with a huge grain of salt. One reason for that is, of course, the chronic vandalism and flame-throwing that used to be par for course, here, in the mid 2000's. Things have gotten much better, though, and Wikipedia's grown to the point where it's much more stable and well-behaved.

One of the subjects on Wikipedia that has caught my attention is Human Anatomy. I remember when the Gray's Anatomy project began, and watched it progress. I've been looking at these pages, off and on, but never really started studying anatomy until the Navbox templates provided the missing link to usability. Whoever started that project, thank you! I must credit those templates for sparking a serious personal interest in the subject.

My Human Anatomy project

I've been spending the past few months coming up to speed on Wikipedia policies and markup (just in time for the new VisualEditor to be of little use to me!), and on what's going on with the anatomy pages, in general. I have developed my own personal project on Human Anatomy, which you can read more about on my project page. Parts of my project go beyond the scope of Wikipedia, but large parts do dovetail with WP:Anatomy's work, quite nicely. So I definitely would like to coordinate my work with theirs.

The short story on the project is that my long-term goal is to help bring the French Wikipedia anatomy pages up to date with the English ones. To be quite honest, looking over the French pages brought back memories ... it's like a Wikipedia museum, in there. Their pages reflect a translation effort before Navboxes, and, for the most part, even before the Gray's project. There is a great deal we can contribute simply by giving them the infrastructure we've built here, over time. Interestingly, I've noticed that WP:Medicine is sponsoring a project, called WP:TTF (Translation Task Force) which aims to do similar work for medical articles in several languages. Naturally, I'll be participating in that effort.

So I've starting looking "under the hood" of our anatomy and medicine articles, and at their Navbox and Infobox templates. And well, to be quite honest, I've been finding a lot more cobwebs than I expected. We've got a big job, here, but I'm up to it, and would love to help y'all get these pages, and the Navbox system, to the next level. Then we will have something really solid that is worth translating. I think what I can contribute to this project are my organization skills and an editor's eye. In short, I may not be an M.D., but I'm pretty well read in the subject, and I'm a perfect example of your target audience.

My MedNav project

Each navigation box on the bottom of Anatomy and Medicine articles is created by its own individual template. All told, there are literally hundreds of these templates in the entire system. They have evolved slowly over the years, making changes, big and small, along the way. The people who developed the system were, in a true sense, pioneers. Of course, one of the perils of being a pioneer is that you're venturing forward without a roadmap. As to be expected, the journey has been an uneven one, with blind turns and dead ends, and perhaps going around in circles, a few times. Developing the system clearly has been a learning experience.

Today, Wikipedia has blossomed ... and become a bit overgrown. There is no shortage of content, here, but finding it can be a bit of a hit or miss affair. The pioneering journey reveals itself in awkward articles and inconsistent navigation. We are no longer in the days of the pioneers with their magnetic compass and their guesstimated distances. We are in the world of Google Earth and GPS.

One of the biggest weaknesses of the current system is documentation. At first, all I could find were references to pages and links that are no longer there. But in cutting through the weeds, I managed to find that our pioneer has left us a map. It's hard to read, and utterly useless if you're not an editor. A typical reader wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it. But it gives us a starting point to build on.

Another weakness is that to move the system to another language, it is necessary to literally translate each and every word of each individual template, one by one. In French, for example, Template:Navbox becomes Modèle:Méta palette de navigation and titlestyle becomes styletitre, nevermind the names of the articles being linked to also need to be translated. Unfortunately, the interlanguage links are of little help, as the templates can't use them directly. Certainly, this has been a major barrier to sharing this system with other language Wikipedias. Even if there was some automated system to handle the translation, there are elements, such as titles and groups, that still must be manually translated. And certainly, no automated process can replace the human element of understanding different cultures.

First steps

My initial effort on this project will be to fully document the existing system, warts and all. Then, after reviewing the final result, I will focus on correcting minor errors, here and there. Incorrect colors, broken links, recategorizing the templates in a more meaningful way. Next, I would like to propose some small, but important changes. Standardizing the naming convention, making the titles more meaningful to our target audience, improving the color scheme. Naturally, I will be announcing my proposals, with full details, so we can have a meaningful discussion and reach a broad consensus before doing anything.

Once the current English MedNav system has been cleaned up, my next effort will focus on translation to French. I expect I may be able to create some scripts to automate part of the process, at least, but it will still need to be fully reviewed by a live human. Standardizing our current templates will be key to being able to automate part of the work. By standardizing, I don't mean inflexible and rigid. I just mean getting rid of some of the quirks that may trip a script up, like unnecessary punctuation in unexpected places, and such.

Thoughts and suggestions

I really look forward to working with you, and helping you bring the current English pages to the next level and, in turn, bringing all that hard work to the French-speaking community, as well. I think have a number of solid ideas and the skill set that can help bring you there. But before I start making changes, I want to have a public discussion of these ideas and to achieve a solid consensus before I start doing anything. Your thoughts and suggestions are key to a successful project. I believe with everyone's help, this project can greatly improve the usability of all our medicine and anatomy pages, just as the original system did.

The time has come to move forward from our pioneering days, and take on the next level. I would gladly appreciate your comments and support.

--D.J.