User talk:Johan G/Table style sandbox

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Automating checklist creation

Hi, this looks really great - must have been a lot of work! I would suggest to check out Aircraft Checklists, which explains how PropertyList XML File are used to create checklists - it should be possible to parse the Aircraft-set.xml file and look for the checklists tag - if it's there, we can automatically create the corresponding wiki markup. I think Gijs has already some code doing this, because the website's aircraft search is doing the same thing obviously - just parsing "development-status" instead obviously. We shouldn't be manually converting checklists, i.e. "DRY" - if we can come up with a scripted solution, things will also be easy to update, and always in-sync with the repository.--Hooray (talk) 14:01, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

That is some good input. Add checklists manually would be quite a chore.
I'm still trying to figure out how to make a good looking checklist that does not break so easily. I have just experimented a little bit yet and I still need to look at existing checklists and figure out what variants there are and if there are any standards that could be helpful. Something I already have noticed I have not though of for years is the convention of <any change bar> Lower case nouns<dotted line>VERB <crew member>.
If I know myself right though it's a 30/60/10% chance that I either continue, shelf it for a while or abandon it.
Johan G (Talk | contribs) 15:14, 12 November 2013 (UTC)
If you can come up with the wiki markup for it, we could write a PHP script that turns existing XML files into your markup, i.e. search/replace - not sure if there's any wikimedia extension that could do that for us, but it should be trivial to write in PHP if necessary. We probably need to talk to Simon or Gijs for this though. No, wait, we're lucky - see:
* mw:Extension:Include
* And this seems very promising: mw:Extension:External Data (it can pull in external XML files and filter/sort/transform them)
--Hooray (talk) 20:18, 12 November 2013 (UTC)