Great googly moogly. Not only is the I/O box ugly, its code is so incredibly imposing that nobody but the most savvy users would dare touch it. Please, how do we fix this?!?!
- Agreed. We are looking at doing it using the new semantic tools in Appropedia... much like the devices listed at Portal:Medical_Devices. Click edit on a page like CellScope to see what the form might look like. We need one semantic mediawiki person to set up the initial forms and then we could start adding them to topic pages on Appropedia to build the permaculture data web of content.
- Thanks for you input and energy, I hope we get this going soon! --Lonny 15:29, 20 February 2012 (PST)
Okiedokie, I guess I'll just twiddle my thumbs until we hear more. --Plotthickens 07:37, 10 April 2012 (PDT)
, but it demonstrates an important analytical tool in the PC design toolbox.
This is element analysis, hence I added that to the box title. The element article would essentially be a deeper explanation of how to use it, and the significance of the different aspects of an element. I delinkified the headings; seemed redundant. I also added/ refined some categories. There are two types of outputs: products and behaviors. Not sure about the Used In category. It's not mentioned in any of my resources. It seems straight-forward, just unprecedented.
As Lonny said, this analysis would be greatly helpful. I'm not attached to this particular template. Has anyone learned enough about the semantic features to make this more robust/ user-friendly? One challenge I foresee is the depth of the information. It would be nice to have a basic infobox such as this for quick reference, but is there a convenient way to expand that information? The Permaculture.info wiki (was intended to) offer some in-depth info on inputs, outputs, etc. There's a great example of what I mean on the chicken article: https://web.archive.org/web/20080221121900/http://www.permaculture.info/index.php/Chickens . Of course, in that case the info is rather "flat", and if we use infoboxes or something similar, we'd want it to be a bit more dynamic. --Ethan (talk) 09:49, 13 May 2015 (PDT)
After taking a close look at Semantic I have a lot better idea of its capabilities and how we can work with it here. I see a couple of different ways of presenting the information. The approach of the example Permaculture.info article takes a sort of middle-ground approach by making a bullet-point list of inputs, outputs, etc. that includes some further information. I think we might be able to have the best of both extremes. First, we can have the flowing, paragraph presentation of the information in the main part of an article. Next, Semantic markup can dynamically populate a small infobox (IE: this template). The only stumbling block I see so far is linking the bullet points of the infobox to the elaboration in the main text. There doesn't seem to be a clear way to do that. --Ethan (talk) 12:45, 13 May 2015 (PDT)