Brion Vibber wrote:

Tim Starling wrote:

...

There are thousands of affected articles, and if there is no solution for this, then I don't think it is acceptable to put this change live.

Why is the template required to close its own tags? It would make things a lot easier if this was not required.

That's how MediaWiki has worked for a long time; it was just broken with Tidy mode enabled, thus guaranteeing that any Wikipedia page using such a template would be broken when copied to another wiki.

Would you prefer to change the behavior? Note that this will require some restructuring to the parser to both be more correct and and not break things, and will leave us with inconsistent, unparseable code in the future. (That is, it'll be impossible to tell what the code after a template inclusion will parse as unless the template is available.)

But if we're really, really sure, we can put some time into working on that and accept that our syntax will never be predictable. (This has consequences for future wysiwyg or markup-sensitive assisted editing plugins.)

What I can do is for now separate the HTML whitelisting and HTML nesting correction into two separate parts, as it's (IMO incorrectly) done right now in Tidy mode. This will let all 1.7 wikis display these templates the same as Wikipedia currently does, by essentially copying the current (broken) Tidy behavior to the default install.

Then we can fight about this again in a few months. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)