And, of course, as Lee already pointed out, it also makes it less tempting for the casual user. A very important argument.
There are 24000 articles now that don't use aliases; they're relatively difficult to set up, and so it's not likely for them to become a major subject of abuse.
Perhaps the user wants this to happen, perhaps not. I suggest we first
wait
and see how many people actually need such features.
_I_ need this feature. I also feel that bringing subpages back from the dead the way this proposal stands is wrong
As to runtime performance concerns, I'm sure that caching and/or an optimised parser could do wonders in the Wikipedia case. Wiki markup is _very light_.
Have you seen the parsing code? There is nothing _very light_ about it, at the moment. I intend to improve that in the future, but found some other problems I would like to solve first. Anyway, adding non-trivial features
is
not going to make that job easier.
I must admit that I did not see the code; however the wiki markup is really simple, compared to most other markup and general-use languages out there. High-performance parsers exist; I believe that eventually the Wiki parser will match them.
If we really want to improve performance, perhaps we should simplify some syntax structures (e.g. doing ISBNs through links [ISBN 200145-3453|this way]), write a formal grammar and then write a parser in C (or some other high-performance language) to reflect that formal grammar. But I digress :-).
Sincerely yours, Uri Yanover