On 9/25/09 2:23 PM, Brian wrote:
You have conveniently ignored the rest of my points, which are not, as you have claimed, off topic. (and you love to jump into threads and claim they have become off topic, historically, with only the points that you are considering being on topic.)
I felt no reason to address them since they're stuck in the tangent discussion about redoing the entire markup system from top to bottom... again...
My experience based on 7 years of MediaWiki development is that this line of discussion has consistently lead to nothing useful being produced.
Rather than go in circles for the millionth time, I recommend sticking to definable, achievable goals which can build on each other -- such as the original topic of this thread.
To wrap them up for you:
- This will fundamentally change mediawiki and the consequences of this
feature have not been considered
The direct consequence is that in the short term we'll actually be able to achieve the situation that normal people will be able to edit articles containing templates.
Having this infrastructure in place further means we're in a better position to someday make a major markup transition (say to a different markup system or not exposing markup at all in a pure-WYSIWYG environment)... something we're now very far from... but doesn't commit us to any markup changes in the near or medium term.
Morever this is all based on existing discussion, knowledge, and experience, not some sudden invention that's never been considered before.
The current work here is most directly inspired by existing systems in the German Wikipedia's Vorlagen-Meister gadget and the Semantic Forms extension... We're hardly creating an idea from whole cloth here; this is real stuff that's been done before in parts and needs to be cleaned up and modernized for Wikipedia's needs.
- We cannot evaluate the repercussions of this feature with respect to our
broader vision for mediawiki because we (by which I mean we, not you personally) do not have one.
Broadly, our strategy is as it always has been: to identify and implement real, measurable benefits to the reading and editing experiences of Wikipedia and other sites.
-- brion