On 12/29/2010 7:05 AM, Bryan Tong Minh wrote:
On Wed, Dec 29, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Maciej Jaros egil@wp.pl wrote:
If one would have a budget of gazillions of dollars then it would be quite easy ;-). The problem is - what would be the point of investing such money if you wouldn't get it back from this investment?
While money can fix a lot of things, I don't think the current bottleneck is money. To break stuff you need to find community consensus, developer consensus, somebody willing to implement it and somebody to review it. Of course for a gazillion dollars you could perhaps the eliminate a few of these steps, but in general they are not really easy to solve with money I think.
I think one of the biggest obstacles to improving the Wikipedia user experience is the requirement that the content has to not only be reusable, but reusable with a minimum amount of effort - i.e. on a free shared hosting environment with neither shell access nor the ability to install or compile programs. With only a couple exceptions[1] any software that's required to display Wikipedia content has to be PHP, have a PHP implementation available, or be done client-side (and of course, we can't use Flash). We're hamstrung by the limitations of what can be reasonably done in pure PHP even in cases when we would be using a C extension or shelling out to an executable.
The recently revived discussion on StringFunctions is a good example of this. Tim and others don't want to install StringFunctions because it will just increase the complexity of wikitext and, like ParserFunctions, will only be a temporary fix until template coders write new templates that reach new limits created. A real solution to the issue is to use a real programming language in place of wikitext for complex templates. But until the aforementioned limitation is relaxed, that's likely never going to happen. We have to either implement an existing language like Lua in PHP or write our own language and maintain 2 implementations of it (the compiled version for WMF and the pure PHP version).
[1] LaTeX and EasyTimeline