On Tue, Jun 30, 2009 at 11:20 AM, Robert Rohde <rarohde(a)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.