JS editing tools and entry unification

Some of the tools can be turned on here. That also turns on Tabbed Languages, but there's a way to turn on those tools without TL at either WT:PREFS or the gadgets section of Special:Preferences. (WT:BP#Admin-only definition editing options trial is a proposal to turn on those tools for admins for a trial period, btw.) Some of the js tools are enabled by default already, such as Conrad.Irwin's translations adder (the boxes at the bottom of translations tables), the definition adder (the "Add definition" button in the toolbox section of the sidebar), and the rhymes adder (the "Add new rhyme" boxes at the bottom of rhymes lists, which add new rhymes to the section and then update the new rhymes' entries to link to the list). There's also Conrad.Irwin's translation gloss editor, which can be enabled at WT:EDIT#Table Labelling, and the example sentence editor which can be enabled in WT:PREFS. The page for the editor is at WT:EDIT, and there's some documentation at User:Conrad.Irwin/editor docs.

For synchronizing data, there are a couple of ways it could be done. One way would be to have individual definitions synchronized with each other so that when one edits either definition or content connected to it an identical edit is made to the synced definition on the other page. Another way, which probably wouldn't work for Mandarin since its entries don't match up one-to-one, would be to just have whole entries synced, so that edits to the language section made via js tools get duplicated on the synced entry. I haven't actually started coding either of these, but I don't think it would be that complicated.

Lovely, thank you! I'll certainly be giving those a look.

About the synch tool possibilities you describe, that's quite inelegant from one point of view (from a DBA perspective, having duped info instead of just setting it up so the entries all use the same field is a bit cringe-worthy), but since the back-end is what it is, that's also a beautiful workaround for a non-optimal DB design. I'll definitely be interested in hearing more if/when such tools see the light of day. Thanks again -- Eiríkr Útlendi | Tala við mig 18:29, 15 August 2011 (UTC)