On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 11:23 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra@gmail.com
wrote:
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) < bjorsch@wikimedia.org> wrote:
<This reply is still my own personal views, and in no way represents anything official>
On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 10:20 AM, Martijn Hoekstra < martijnhoekstra@gmail.com
wrote:
If we have to resort to such magic to make templates do what we want, templates are quite simply broken; how can we explain that to a
newcomer.
"To help with these templates, all you have to know about are wikitext templates, our own implementation of lisp, Javascript, and Lua, and
you'll
be good to go". I suspect the number of people in the world who know
how
to
do that is very close to 1. Especially for usecases like this, we need something less complicated.
If "we" (TINW) actually want dialogs (which I'm not convinced of beyond a few very special cases), trying to do it in templates with embedded code
is
the wrong way to do it.
Well, that's the discussion I'm trying to open: If that's the wrong way, is there a right way (yet) ? I'd like to look at this from the perspective of what the correct way would be to make that happen.
That would take a more detailed look at what is actually trying to be accomplished with these dialogs. For example, enwiki's Teahouse[1] has a dialog for newbies to more easily post questions, but it's implemented as a gadget that generates the form specific for that page. To what extent to we have actual use cases for many differently-designed dialogs? How does the lisp even enter into the current design?
But in general, the answer almost certainly isn't to be doing things with a mess of complex templates with their own custom lisp dialect.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions