[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Foundation-l] Help needed to fix broken templates

[David Gerard]

Where do our most dedicated parser abusers hang out? They need to know
about this.


- d.



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org>
Date: 17 Jan 2008 13:34
Subject: [Foundation-l] Help needed to fix broken templates
To: wikitech-l at lists.wikimedia.org, foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org


(Cross-posting to wikitech-l and foundation-l, I suggest replying on
wikitech-l.)

All known bugs in the new preprocessor have been fixed. So it's now time
to enable it on Wikimedia. Unfortunately, a lot of articles and templates
rely on bugs in the old parser, and ideally they should be fixed before
the switchover.

We'll be aiming to switch to the new preprocessor on the 24th of January.

For technical background information about this project see my first post
on this subject:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2007-November/035154.html

Over the past few days, Splarka and MZMcBride have been putting in a great
deal of work to beta test the new parser, by checking articles on the
English Wikipedia and several other wikis for any changes. Between the
three of us, we've built up extensive documentation of the commonly-seen
differences between the old and new parsers, and we've identified and
fixed eight distinct bugs in the new parser.

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Migration_to_the_new_preprocessor

We'd now like to invite the rest of the community to help.

This post is just a brief summary of the wiki page, please go there to
find out more.


The two most common problems with existing articles are comments after
headings, and abuse of bug 5678. Here's a comment after a heading:

== Heading == <!-- that was a heading -->

This will still make a heading in the new preprocessor, but it won't make
a section edit link. In the old parser, it does make a section edit link.
This change was done to resolve various incarnations of bug 4899, i.e.
mismatches between the section edit link and the section you end up editing.

Bug 5678 is a cluster of problems associated with double-parsing of the
results of parser functions. It's often reported and causes a great deal
of distress. But since the standard way to find out how to write wikitext
is to try it and see what works, many people have inadvertently utilised
behaviour arising from this bug to do various things.

A typical example is misuse of {{!}} to separate template parameters, as in:

{{#if:1| {{template{{!}}parameter}} }}

In the new preprocessor, {{!}} can never be used to separate parameters.
The fact that it was possible in the old parser in certain circumstances
was an accident.

Please see [[m:Migration to the new preprocessor]] for information about
how you can find and fix these problems.



I have introduced two cool new parser features to help ease the pain:
{{#tag:}} and {{#iferror:}}. #tag allows you to invoke XML-style tags such
as <ref> with syntax similar to parser functions, with full access to
template parameters. For example:

{{#tag:ref|[{{{url}}} {{{text}}}]}}

This is equivalent to:

<ref>[{{{url}}} {{{text}}}]</ref>

except that it works. You can also use #tag to call <imagemap> and
<gallery>. #tag is a core parser function with a slightly different syntax
to the one used by the TagParser extension. It is intended for use in
meta-templates where the simpler XML-style syntax is not sufficiently
versatile.

#iferror detects error return codes from #time and #expr. It is part of
the ParserFunctions extension.

-- Tim Starling

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