2009/1/11 Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu:
I believe that the introduction of ParserFunctions to MediaWiki was not done with community consensus and has led to an extremely fast devolution in wiki syntax. Further, the usability of Wikipedia has declined at a rate proportional to the adoption of parser functions.
Is there *anybody* on this list that is willing to say that this is more usable than what we had before? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Infobox&action=raw
From the POV of what you find in articles yes (the horrid multi
template infoboxes we used to have). From the POV of not having a template with a secondary function as a doomsday button yes (Template:Qif).
Remember a lot of ParserFunctions was not new functionality per se but providing a better way to do stuff people had already worked out how to do with existing functions.
So yes going by how widely template:qif was deployed there was consensus among those who deal with these things that such functions should exist.