Hoi, In the past the existence of templates in one wiki has been used as an argument to not accept an extension. With extensions you have functionality that is indeed intended to be external to ordinary users but you are talking about functionality that can be tested. With templates you have stuff that can adn does severely impact performance and is at the same time not usable on other systems.
While it may be so that you can not effectively contribute to an article on something esoteric as the "ten commondmanets in Roman Catholocism", it might be possible for you to translate it in another language if you have the language skills. With the way templates are I would not touch them with a barge pole if I can help it. Templates are however the only tool we consider for things like info boxes and stuff. They are as a result quite important from a functional point of view. From a usability point of view they are horrible.
In conclusion, templates are used and they prove to be problematic. The best proof of this is the recent performance issues we had. Thanks, GerardM
2009/6/26 Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell@gmail.com
On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:01 PM, Gerard Meijssengerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, At some stage Wikipedia was this thing that everybody can edit... I can
not
and will not edit this shit so what do you expect from the average Joe ??
I can not (effectively) contribute to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments_in_Roman_Catholicism
Does this mean Wikipedia is a failure?
I don't think so. Not everyone needs to be able to do everything. Thats one reasons projects have communities: Other people can do the work which I'm not interested in or not qualified for. Not everyone needs to make templates— and there are some people who'd have nothing else to do but add fart jokes to science articles if the site didn't have plenty of template mongering that needed doing.
Unfortunately the existing system is needlessly exclusive. The existing parser function uses solution are so byzantine that even many people with the right interest and knowledge are significantly put off from it.
The distinction between this and a general "easy to use" is a very critical one.
It's also the case that the existing system's problems spills past its borders due to its own limitations: Regular users need to deal with things like weird whitespace handling and templates which MUST be substed (or can't be substed; at random from the user's perspective). This makes the system harder even for the vast majority of people who should never need to worry about the internals of the templates.
I think this is the most important issue, and its one with real usability impacts, but it's not due to the poor syntax. On this point, the template language could be intercal but still leave most users completely free to ignore the messy insides. The existing system doesn't because there is no clear boundary between the page and the templates (among other reasons, like the limitations of the existing 'string' manipulation functions).
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