Stevertigo wrote:
Hm. That "crap" seems to have worked quite
well for a few years now.
Hardly. The templating system has been a source of complaints and
frustrations for a very long time. I remember hearing Aaron Swartz get
a lot of laughter when he gave a talk at Wikimania 2006 and showed a
Powerpoint slide with a screenful of templating gibberish that
consisted of an huge, nested series of squiggly brackets, numerals and
odd symbols. The line that drew the big laugh was when he asked if
people thought that syntax was user-friendly.
The current system of parser functions is actually an improvement over
what existed previously, because at least it provides for an if-then
statement and some rudimentary calculations and logical branching.
Before parser functions existed, people used an even uglier workaround
in which they achieved the RESULT of an if-then statement through a
process so complicated and counter-intuitive that it would take
several labored paragraphs for me to even describe it . It was because
that system DIDN'T "work quite well" that parser functions were
developed. They're not very easy to use either, which is why the
developers are now trying to come up with a better alternative.
I should mention too that a number of Mediawiki extensions have been
written over the years -- Semantic Mediawiki, for example -- which are
also basically attempts to overcome the limitations of Mediawiki
syntax and the templating system in particular. There are also oodles
of extensions that people have written in attempts to add some widget
or transclusion feature to Mediawiki such as Google maps or RSS feeds.
If the current system "worked quite well," a lot of those add-on
extensions would be unnecessary.
The fact that the current template system works poorly is no one's
fault. It's a consequence of the ad hoc way that Mediawiki and
Wikipedia have evolved, and of course that ad hoc evolution is no
one's fault either. If everyone had waited until they had a perfect
wiki platform before launching Wikipedia, the project would never have
gotten off the ground. The tech people have generally performed
admirably at building and maintaining the software that runs
Wikipedia, and I think it's great that they're talking about ways to
further improve the templating system, which could certainly use it. I
think they understand all too well that it's not a good system, and
they also understand how difficult it will be to come up with a better
alternative.
-------------------------------------------
SHELDON RAMPTON
Research director, Center for Media & Democracy
Center for Media & Democracy
520 University Avenue, Suite 227
Madison, WI 53703
phone: 608-260-9713
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