Triple crosspost, I suggest following up to wikitech-l only.
As part of a change to improve the parsing speed for double-brace entities, I'm changing the syntax of a few unusual function-like constructs, to make them more like the other parser functions (unless anyone can think of a good reason not to).
We currently have a number of statistics variables which accept an optional "raw mode" suffix. This suppresses language-dependent number formatting. They are:
{{NUMBEROFPAGES|R}} {{NUMBEROFUSERS|R}} {{NUMBEROFARTICLES|R}} {{NUMBEROFFILES|R}} {{NUMBEROFADMINS|R}}
This will be changed to:
{{NUMBEROFPAGES:R}} {{NUMBEROFUSERS:R}} {{NUMBEROFARTICLES:R}} {{NUMBEROFFILES:R}} {{NUMBEROFADMINS:R}}
This brings them into line with parser functions such as {{localurl:}}, and thus allows them to take advantage of the new more efficient handling of such constructs that I have just implemented.
The non-raw syntax, e.g. {{NUMBEROFPAGES}}, will stay the same.
-- Tim Starling