On 11/9/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
You can either enter raw wikitext, or a list of article titles. Templates can be automatically resolved (which is necessary for some pages, as otherwise the wiki syntax is invalid and rendered as plain text). Article and template texts are fetched from the given MediaWiki site.
There has been some discussion on IRC about potentially changing syntax so that this doesn't happen. (It horribly breaks WYSIWYG editing, it muddles up history, etc).
I'd like to see a longer and more thought out discussion on the list.
My thought is that if we consider the parse tree of wikitext it should be that templates should only be able to affect a subtree under the node where they are included, not make changes to the syntax at their level or above. I.e. you should be able to completely parse the wikitext, then go in and insert subtrees at the templates and not change anything else.
This *will* break a few things people have done on enwiki (I know this because I ran into pages that broke my parser), but I don't think there is anything useful that breaking this prevents accomplishing.