On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hey Tyler,
Many of these issues have already been discussed on this mailing list. Read
Rob and Tim's emails from last week to start with. As explained in the
previous emails, the extension being deployed is Scribunto. Regarding
performance testing, Rob said this would be done once the extension was
deployed to
mediawiki.org: "From there, we'll need some time figuring out
the performance characteristics of this (making sure we're actually coming
out ahead) as well as converting some key templates over." Many of the
other questions are covered at
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Scribunto.
And not to be overly dismissive, but the idea that Tim needs to prove that
en.wiki wants this feature is absurd. The template system on Wikipedia is
BROKEN. It takes over 30 seconds for the parser to render large articles,
and articles with a really large number of citation templates can't render
at all, they simply error with a timeout. The only reason Lua/Scribunto was
developed is because the en.wiki community has been vocally complaining
about this problem FOR 3 YEARS. Check out
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19262 for example.
Ryan Kaldari
Furthermore,
mediawiki.org is a community essentially owned by the
developers, not to mention this
feature is non-user facing. If people don't want to use it, they don't have to.
I do believe consensus should be sought when enabling extensions like
moodbar and what not on enwikipedia,
but this is nothing like that situation.
--bawolff