On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 11:23 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com
wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 4:46 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <
> bjorsch(a)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(a)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