Jakob Voss wrote:
Oh my god! Is there no common sense in the English Wikipedia? Don't you have no community procedures to stop people from doing this?
- Only activate the if-construct. You can use it for optional parameters
in templates. This is the only useful application that I can think of.
I don't understand. You are (understandably) horrified by the massive 'subtract' template, but also then suggest to NOT implement Tim's 'expr' feature which would replace (and improve upon) it with a single line? Why?
I agree that the current add/subtract templates are overboard, but there are viable uses for mathematical functions. See;
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Yesterday&action=edit
Now, that is about as efficient as currently possible for what it does (generate yesterday's date - including month/year changeovers and leap-days), but with mathematic evaluation it could be reduced to just a few lines. More complex capabilities = less complex pages.
That kind of 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' logic was first introduced on English Wikipedia only a couple of weeks ago, but is already used on hundreds of pages for a variety of effects (previewing 'daily' content in advance to verify that it is formatted correctly, going back to 'yesterday's main page' to find something you saw before, browsing forward and backward through pages arranged in date order, et cetera). Heavy use is fairly good indicator of 'usefullness'.