On 10/8/07, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
On 08/10/2007, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
A better solution would be to stop abusing messages for certain elements, e.g. for blacklists, whitelists, the sidebar, etc.
Can you explain what this means? Do you mean the wiki users should stop abusing the messages somehow? What blacklists and whitelists?
What Rob is referring to here is the tendency of some developers (I've been an offender before) to use interface messages to let people configure things. For instance, my use of MediaWiki:autoblock-exempt, the use of MediaWiki:Spam blacklist, et cetera, et cetera.
As I was discussing last night with another developer, these are almost always better implemented, at least from an interface perspective, as extra special pages and database tables. Unfortunately, that's extra effort that a lot of developers aren't prepared to put in - as it will often involve schema changes, and certainly involves writing extra code.
As to what this has to do with MediaWiki:sitesubtitle, I have no idea - as that's certainly a localisable interface message, rather than configuration data related to MediaWiki.