On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Robert Rohde rarohde@gmail.com wrote:
You couldn't ever turn template syntax off without making old revisions unrenderable. The best one could likely do is encourage people to upgrade and provide tools to make that easier. However, given the nastiness of template syntax, I would expect no end of wiki authors willing to help convert the commonly used stuff.
-Robert Rohde
The solution (no doubt first developed on this list many years ago) is to have mark revisions that still trigger the template/parser functions parser as using that syntax, and to mark revisions that have moved on as using the new language.
Moreover, old revisions already are unrenderable. They may look like they render correctly but in fact they don't. This is because mediawiki has no notion of the fact that a particular revision of an article also uses particular revisions of templates etc...
At any rate, I don't see how this nitpick is a difficult problem technically.