On 19/08/11 04:50, Tim Starling wrote:
<snip>
I'm very anxious about getting this right. I think
the current
situation with template programming on Wikimedia wikis is terrible,
and I think it's largely my fault. The language is ugly and
inaccessible, causing metatemplate editing to be confined to a small
group of elite editors, and it's slow, causing save times of 40
seconds or more on popular articles. Perhaps by supporting the right
solution here, I can gain some absolution.
At the time you implemented the templates and parserfunctions, the
community gave you a huge "thank you!". It was probably better to have
barely usable feature than no feature at all :-)
When you wrote your code, I am sure you never thought the community will
push your system to its limit. So there is nobody to blame you on that.
For the good part, the functions lowered the pressure imposed to the few
core devs by the community since YOU enabled them to create new features!
We probably should have created PHP extensions for the most used
templates. The enwiki {{citation}} template comes to mind.
Just to help you on the way to absolution, please remember your day is
in roughly 2 months!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tim_Starling_Day
--
Ashar Voultoiz