Tels wrote:
On Thursday 06 April 2006 21:35, Ilmari Karonen wrote:
This is all very well, except that it means anyone who wants to develop such an extension must first figure out how to set up a local MediaWiki installation, including installing MySQL and a webserver (usually Apache). And configuring those to be secure, since the default configuration for webservers tends to expose them to any hacker or spammer that happens by.
Nonsense, to hack or develop for wikipedia you do not need a public wiki. (my test wiki isn't public and yet I created an extension)
Neither is mine, but if I didn't have a firewall in place, the default Apache config would've been open to anyone who knew or guessed my IP.
I know about such things, of course, and so do you, but most people who would just like to create a new infobox on Wikipedia don't.
And it means they must learn, even for the simplest of things, a significant subset of the MediaWiki internals, which are even worse documented than template syntax.
Or they could ask a developer.
We don't have enough devs.
And it means they must be much more careful, since a MediaWiki extension can screw up the system in lots of ways that a template can't.
I do think you are in for a surprise here, because templates that "compute" can be far more dangerous than you think.
Are you actually arguing against Tim's new syntax here, or against some hypothetical straw-man scenario? Tim's proposal includes conditionals and simple arithmetic expressions -- it does not allow loops nor recursion. MediaWiki syntax isn't Turing-complete, and I believe there is a rather firm consensus to keep it that way.
But there are only a few really usefull features, like you said, infoboxes. You can put the common ones into an extension or mediawiki feature, and real software developers will care for them, they will write testcases for them, they will be secured etc etc, e.g. everything that is done with code today.
I don't think there's enough common logic in the various infobox templates to usefully refactor into a generic extension. Or are you proposing separate MediaWiki extensions for every single infobox, from {{taxobox}} all the way down to {{Harry Potter character}}?
And what exactly are those security risks that you think an infobox might have, with or without Tim's new syntax?