2009/7/1 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 10:19 PM, stevertigostvrtg@gmail.com wrote:
You provide no context
The title says it all - MediaWiki is getting a new programming language.
That doesn't even mention the word "template", which is what the whole discussion is about.
(more to the point) you gave no indication that the techies actually want non-technical input.
The fact that the "techies" do not actively seek out community input is why we ended up with ParserFunctions. Furthermore these changes are supposed to be 'community' decisions. The 'techies' are also not the people who edit Wikipedia articles the most. They write code, fix servers etc...
ParserFunctions were implemented because there was a demand for them. One of the greatest strengths and also the greatest weaknesses of the way MediaWiki is developed is that there is very little top-down direction and people just get on and do what seems like a good idea. That results in a lot of quick fixes, like ParserFunctions, which means features that are high in demand get implemented quickly but it also means that the solutions are often far from optimal. I don't see how any of that would be fixed by community discussion. I'm not even sure what community would discuss it - the core Mediawiki code is used by far more than just the English Wikipedia (or even the whole of the Wikimedia movement).