On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 12:00 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <bjorsch@wikimedia.org
wrote:
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?
The part about lisp, perhaps I've addressed in the other message I just posted (though it seems to have gone off with a distressing number of typos in it). And as for looking at examples of dialogs --- I agree, and I /don't/ have examples, exactly because this ****storm over superprotect has been precipitated by the Foundation /before/ I'd really intended to go widely public with my tools. I've decided people should be aware of what I'm doing even though I'm not quite there yet, but honestly, the primary route I'd always envisioned, to convince people that my ideas were viable, was to /demonstrate/ it, by building the tools and then starting to use them to build wizards. This is what has always worked best for me in the past: if I can see the potential in a low-level tool, the best way to show others the potential I see is to make it real. It's taken me an appalling amount of time (three years) to develop the tools, partly because at every little step in the design I've stopped to consider the implications for practical applications (like the difference between carving a statue by hand-and-eye with a hammer and chisel, versus pouring cement into a mold). Which I suppose is another part of my contention that design decisions about wikis should be made in the field.