In response to a campaign by users of the English Wikipedia to harrass developers by
introducing
increasingly ugly and inefficient meta-templates to popular pages, I've caved in and
written a few
reasonably efficient parser functions. There are two conditional functions and a
mathematical
expression function. The expression function should support uses such as time and date
deltas, as
well as floating point applications such as unit conversion. The conditional functions
should
replace most uses of {{qif}}, and improve the efficiency of similar templates.
Documentation is at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/ParserFunctions
I would like to hear comments about the syntax, before we put them live. Syntax is guided
by
consistency with existing functions such as {{localurl:}}, but if it looks too unwieldy
then we can
probably change it.
Don't blame me. I've always been against turning wikitext into a programming
language. I'm just
weaker than the other developers. How can I stand by and watch this sort of thing be
inflicted on
our articles:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ed_Poor/subtract&action=…
I had a choice between going on a deletion rampage or answering the persistent calls on
the wiki for
this kind of thing to be implemented.
Templates, that's where it all went wrong. Or custom messages, as we called them back
then. If only
I understood what a Pandora's box I was opening when I implemented {{MSG:}}.
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/018536.html
-- Tim Starling