On 4/5/06, Tim Starling <t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote: Why? Steve

On 05/04/06, Steve Bennett <stevage(a)gmail.com> wrote: Because the idea of wikitext is to make editing as simple as possible for Joe User who clicks Edit. Joe User who, perhaps, doesn't know what HTML is. Rob Church

On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 04:14:31PM +0100, Rob Church wrote: Hee. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?

On Wed, 05 Apr 2006 18:27:24 +0300 Rotem Liss <mail(a)rotemliss.com> wrote: *strong* support zay gezunt / kveðja / gruß / salutas / best regards reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]

On Thu, 06 Apr 2006 02:02:04 +1000 Tim Starling <t.starling(a)physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote: http://epov.org/wd-gemet/index.php/Template_talk:user_native_speaker_level#… Is about *(re-)designing* the Babel templates. It is *not* intended to use the templates http://epov.org/wd-gemet/index.php/Template_talk:user_lang#step_by_step on *every* user page. As soon as the texts are available and Bug 2777: request for a {{substall:foo}} beside {{subst:bar}} is a vailable a bot can regenerate all Babel templates. Unfortunatelly I can not show you the 120 hour work done on Rob's previous test wiki "Dev-HEAD". In order to identify the font-family, font-size parameters for about 80 languages using scripts other then 10pt I used {{switch}} at all levels: direction font-family font-size sample-text-short sample-text-long One could see acceptable fonts for the 80 language codes. Onece the requirements for displaying multiscript / multilanguage text on *one* page one can start the discussion what markup is required for simple users. reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]

Tim Starling wrote: It's syntactic sugar for a series of conditionals. I used to recommend {{switch}} over {{qif}} for performance reasons, since multiple calls to qif can often be replaced with one switch, but I doubt it makes as much difference in the new implementation. Still, switch is often more readable, and having it would make converting existing templates easier. -- Ilmari Karonen

Moin, On Wednesday 05 April 2006 22:57, Magnus Manske wrote: A wiki can already viewed as a collection of large programs: * artikle = program with input (the wiki text) and output (the HTML) * executed by running it in the browser, output is cached as to not "run" the program if the output wouldn't change (clever!) * template = subroutine, takes input, outputs something different * params to subroutines (templates) * default params to subroutines (templates) * recursion (template includes itself, is that already possible?) You can then view a wiki as a collection of programs (artikles) and subroutines (templates, some of them are used in multiple programs). Now add conditional templates, and you got suddenly conditional subroutine execution. I guess adding loops is not far away, and at that point it would be turing complete. 10 print "Hello World!" 20 goto 10 isn't that much different from: Hello World! {{ {{{ARTICLENAME}}} }} (No idea if that actually works, but one might imagine it) :-) Best wishes, Tels -- Signed on Wed Apr 5 23:22:10 2006 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. "Zudem könnten nun nicht mehr nur Täter, sondern auch Opfer abgehört werden, um diese besser zu schützen." Jörg Bode, FDP - http://heise.de/newsticker/data/anw-11.12.03-003/

Rotem Liss wrote: It might therefore be a good idea to only evaluate formulae and conditional expressions to work within templates, and to simply treat them as plain text anywhere else. Templates using these programming features can then be treated by most users as "magic spells" that work automagically, without needing to learn these advanced features. -- Neil

On 4/5/06, Conrad Dunkerson <conrad.dunkerson(a)worldnet.att.net> wrote: I think this is the most important thing people need to understand about template complexity: by making the *template* complex, we're making the articles *simpler* and easier to maintain. -L

On 4/6/06, Jakob Voss &lt;jakob.voss(a)nichtich.de&gt; wrote: I think that could be a reasonable restriction. Template code already tends to be messy, and these new functions might actually make it cleaner in a few cases. But I'd rather not see calculation functions and such used in the article namespace. As for the syntax, might it make sense to use a double colon instead of a single colon, e.g. {{if:: <condition> | <then text> | <else text> }}? I'm not a big fan of the semantic overload we have with single colon prefixes. Erik

On 4/5/06, Erik Moeller &lt;eloquence(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: This would be a bad idea, specifically, because it wouldn't allow people to make tests in their userspace sandbox(es). Better to allow it to be used anywhere, and let individual projects develop policies to limit or restrict it's use. -L

Locke Cole wrote: Okay then: support its use in template, MediaWiki and user namespaces: just not in any other namespaces. Problem solved. It _has_ to be a programmatic restriction, or people will inevitably ignore it, and present a fait accompli through usage. -- Neil

On 4/5/06, Neil Harris &lt;neil(a)tonal.clara.co.uk&gt; wrote: Again, I think we should defer to individual projects and not impose it as developer mandate. If individual projects want it turned off in specific namespaces, let them decide. The decision shouldn't be made arbitrarily here on a mailing list. -L

On Wed, Apr 05, 2006 at 06:32:01PM -0700, Ray Saintonge wrote: That sounds like an argument in favor of penalizing smart users at the expense of stupid users -- worse, making it harder for the smart users to *help* the stupid users. That way lies madness, and sweaty palms. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?

Jay R. Ashworth wrote: It would be easy enough to require a double colon for extension functions. A single colon would still be required for older parser functions such as {{ns:}}, for backwards compatibility. I've set up a vote on meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:ParserFunctions#Double_colons.3F -- Tim Starling

Tim Starling wrote: I created {{TALKSPACE}} and its counterpart {{ARTICLESPACE}} after requesting the equivalent variables several times on this list. I would be more than happy to see them replaced with the equivalent variables now that they seem to have proven their utility. HTH HAND -- Phil -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Mathematical-expressions-and-conditional-constructs%2… Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.

On Thu, 6 Apr 2006 04:28:09 -0700 (PDT) Phil Boswell &lt;phil.boswell(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > I created {{TALKSPACE}} and its counterpart {{ARTICLESPACE}} after > requesting the equivalent variables several times on this list. > I would be more than happy to see them replaced with the equivalent > variables now that they seem to have proven their utility. > HTH HAND > -- > Phil This (additional magic variables) is another story. If you start thinking how wiki knowledge propagates trough language communities how the distance between large and startup communities gets greather and greather you may ask yourself if this (core MediaWiki) is discrimantory or not. As a result functionality / infrastructure is unavailable at the majority of the projects. What I never understand is that oposition comes (mainly) from persons belonging to communities having the most benefit because "workarounds" are (already) available there, because they do not face particular problems (related to characters, fonts, scripts etc.). The patterns about aproaching this is the same here: - "Is it good for me?" counts more then "Is it good for all?" - "If I do not need this why others should need / have it?". reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 04:28:09AM -0700, Phil Boswell wrote: I had gathered, Phil, that those were being avoided because they were going to conflict with a planned extension and generalization of namespaces that would make Talk less special -- if I correctly understood what I read. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?

On 06/04/06, Phil Boswell &lt;phil.boswell(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: I'm quite willing to add these magic words, but there is one question which needs answering before this happens; what should be done with a {{TALKSPACE}} or similar tag if the current namespace doesn't *have* a talk namespace? Rob Church

On 06/04/06, Steve Bennett &lt;stevage(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Well, I was thinking more along the lines of providing {{TALKPAGE}} and {{SUBJECTPAGE}} (and the corresponding "encoded" form) magic words. I'd be inclined to point them back to the same namespace, for cases where the opposing namespace doesn't exist; so things *don't* break and become confused...but herein lies the whole users-get-confused problem. Rob Church

Moin, On Thursday 06 April 2006 14:40, Stephen Forrest wrote: Exactly, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a distributed programming contest, whose ouput accidentily looks like an encyclopedia :) Best wishes, Tels -- Signed on Thu Apr 6 18:42:09 2006 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. "We're looking at a future where only the very largest companies will be able to implement software, and it will technically be illegal for other people to do so." -- Bruce Perens, 2004-01-23

Moin, On Thursday 06 April 2006 00:52, Locke Cole wrote: And it also changes the "you can edit anything" to "you can edit articles. For most templates, please study computer science and a real programming language for a year and then come back". Best wishes, Tels -- Signed on Thu Apr 6 18:46:39 2006 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. " ...the Machholz Comet is named after the guy who really discovered it. Bob Comet." -- Zathras26 (763537) on 2005-01-01 at /.

Rob Church wrote: There's an internal MediaWiki function called Namespace::getTalk() that does this. It's used quite a lot, so I'd expect it'll continue to be maintained in some form. Given that, I see no reason not to expose the same behavior to users. By the way, now that there's apparently an easy way to add "parser functions", how about that {{urlencode:}} function I've been asking for? Among other things, having it would mean we'd no longer have to create two versions of each variable, one with an "E" suffix and one without. -- Ilmari Karonen

Ray Saintonge wrote: Yes, the ability to type is still required. We haven't simplified things THAT much. :] In which case they ALSO wouldn't have been able to figure out the markup which the template has replaced/simplified. No, we can't anticipate everything that every user might want to do and have a nice simple pre-packaged way of making that happen all ready for them.... but that strikes me as an illogical reason for not setting up utility templates at all. I'll never understand the 'it might be too complex so let's not do it' argument... setting aside that this just ISN'T complicated stuff, even if it WERE it doesn't TAKE AWAY anything. All the older methods of doing things are still there. Just now there are additional ways of getting things done - and if not everyone understands those, so what? It isn't hurting the people who don't. Indeed, it helps even those who don't understand the logic because all they need to know is the name of the template to call... not how it works. You don't need to know how to build an automobile in order to drive one. The 'we are building an encyclopedia not programming' argument is equally unmoving to me. Ok then... get rid of all HTML font settings, colors, tables, CSS, templates, et cetera. Oh, those are USEFUL for building an encyclopedia? Hmmm.... imagine that. I wonder if automatic distance conversions in articles would be useful... given that some of our readers (and editors) use imperial and some use metric? Temperature scales? Weights? The idea that people will turn this into an excuse to write full fledged programs having nothing to do with an encyclopedia seems to me silly on it's face... but suppose they would... for some unknowable reason... how many nanoseconds do you suppose something like that would last on 'templates for deletion'?

Moin, On Thursday 06 April 2006 21:35, Ilmari Karonen wrote: That still means yo do put the code in the data (aka the article space) and keep it out of the code (aka the CVS). This totally reverses what we have learnt about software development in the past decades. Putting software into a repository means you can cheack it out, test it, patch it, etc etc. You can also secure it. Well, you can even syntax check it. Put the code in to the template system, and you suddenly loose all that. Plus anybody who wants to use the same features also has to copy the code (aka the templates). You seem still to think that if the template switch (f.i.) is added to Wikipedia, than thats enough. What about other people who also want to use that? How do you "install" the template switch into other wikis? Upgrade them? Even version them? Or compare them? What if there is a security problem? How do you notify "users" of the code you create? I say it again: Code to code, data to data. You do no mix them, or you will have to clean up the mess you create today. gee, I sound so old now :-( But wasn't the consens that the ideas behin this are trivial, but the templates are non-trivial because they are no proper code but hacks? And yes, I advocate putting up extensions or patches for often requested features. Either the people hacking on these templates have enough knowledge and time to work with real code, then they can create proper patches. Or they don't, and then they shouldn't maintain code. (or neither create code that has to be maintained in the future by somebody else). 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) Or they could ask a developer. I do think you are in for a surprise here, because templates that "compute" can be far more dangerous than you think. In addition, other people who want then to use the same feature could just download the newest mediawiki, which includes a feature they want. Or in your scenary, they could go to wikipedia, hunt down all the little templates, and input them into their own wiki. But there are only a few really usefull features, like you said, infoboxes. You can put the co,mon 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. Or you can create a big mess of little templates, all intermingled and mixed and have numerous users edit them, and easily break them. Best wishes, Tels -- Signed on Fri Apr 7 01:27:56 2006 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. "My other computer is your Windows box." -- Dr. Brad (19034) on 2004-08-13 at /.

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 06:42:51PM +0200, Tels wrote: But, as is frequently pointed out, Mediawiki is not *only* wikipedia, even if you only take WMF projects into account. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?

On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 06:44:43PM +0200, Tels wrote: I thought someone already had, but I can't find it. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?

On 4/6/06, Tels &lt;nospam-abuse(a)bloodgate.com&gt; wrote: That would be ok. Some of the more complex existing templates (notably, that babel one that lists all languages and their language codes or something) require you to have spent 6 months meditating in a Tibetan monastery and achieving inner peace. Seriously, I don't understand the argument against a more advanced template language. 1. We currently have evilly complex templates that no one in their right mind would go poking at. These would become simpler. 2. Anyone who wants to write a userbox template is not going to be discouraged by the existence of more advanced commands (ok, that's an argument against it). 3. Anyone who has the misfortune to see the inner workings of a complex template may actually survive the experience if it uses sane code with real expressions, rather than ways of tricking the parser into doing things it really, really doesn't want to do. And that person may actually be able to maintain or improve that template! Steve

On 4/7/06, Tels &lt;nospam-abuse(a)bloodgate.com&gt; wrote: If they're working from a database dump, they'll be in the dump. If you meant more generally, I suppose they could be copied to meta and categorized if really useful. -L

I don't think so. A user sees an article that contains a nice little infobox, edits the article and sees {{Infobox Foobar|maintitle=Foo|subtitle=Bar}} The user wants to have a similar infobox in another article, only with an added subsubtitle. Remark: If the user knows nothing about templates, he has a problem already. This was one of the reasons why the "templates used on this page" list was added. So, the user goes to Template:Infobox Foobar. Option A: The template is a plain-old simple template containing something like {| align=right ! {{maintitle}} |- | {{subtitle}} |} The user just copies the template into [[Template:Infobox Foobar extended]] and copy&pastes a single line in the table. Only the knowledge of table syntax is required. Option B: The template is extremely powerful, general, using complex logic with many qifs, switches, etc. and comes with a two-page usage guide. In this case, the user is lost. He might once or twice try to copy a line containing subtitle, only to find out it does not work (maybe because it was in an if branch that is used only on even Tuesdays, or he forgot to wrap that line to another template so it ended in an invisible div, or whatever). Note that I admit there are uses to complex templates, but they _do_ add complexity and raise the bar for (novice?) users. -- [[cs:User:Mormegil | Petr Kadlec]]

On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 10:43:33AM +0200, Tels wrote: Huh? Excuse me: "Moin is the name of another wiki software, occasionally considered to be competitive with MediaWiki. Are you using it's name here repeatedly as a form of address to be provocative?" I'm becoming more and more certain that you're merely trolling; this question is completely orthogonal to the issue at hand, and appears to be merely intended to be provocative as well. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?

Moin, On Friday 07 April 2006 16:02, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: No, I use it as a form of greeting since like, oh, a decade. I hope not. :-( I am writing about these issues because I see problems arise and want them to be avoided before it's to late. Handwaving and "I dont see this as a problem" will not make problems go away, and I'd rather have a discussion about potential designs and solutions _before_ they are implemented. No, it is an issue I consider very important. There is a difference between adding something like {{yesterday}} as a feature to the mediawiki software, or creating a template for it. In the later case you get all sorts of issues, like I described earlier. As I said before, these requested features should be added to the software side, and not be created by creating a new template-language with all the problems that arise from that. I hope that clears it up. Best wishes, Tels -- Signed on Fri Apr 7 16:07:27 2006 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. "I intend to live forever, or die trying." -- Groucho Marx

On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 04:13:05PM +0200, Tels wrote: Does it mean something, in one of the 25000 or so languages I don't speak? Ok, that's fine. But the things you say you see as potential problems just... well, I can't see how they *could* be problems -- to the people potentiall implementing the extensions *or* the people running wikis -- and I say that with almost 25 years of systems analysis and design as a background. People will take advantage of any tool you provide them to accomplish their own work -- but there is no *global* problem of managing *those templates* (the ones which take advantage of the proposed new extensions), because they are all effectively private. Someone may choose to *start* a repository of such scripts/templates, orthogonally to the people who create them, and subject to licensing, and that would potentially be a neat idea (though it might merely be another branch on meta), but it's not necessary to justify *adding* the extensions in any fashion that I can perceive. And yet, AFAIK, {{yesterday}} *is* a template. If it isn't now, it certainly started as one, and that's the old cycle: you implement the feature you need with what you have, and if it's useful and inefficient, you then push it down into the core. It does, but I disagree with you. Your suggested approach ("everything people want should be implemented in the core, immediately") does not scale well at all, and therefore will pinch off useful development by people who *are* equipped to build complex templates, but are *not* equipped to write PHP code. That is obviously a Bad Thing to me. Again: it's penalising the smart people. You haven't, as far as I can see, provided a cogent argument as to why it's good. Hopefully, I have clarified both my point of view and my perception of yours, and some other folks will also jump back on this bandwagon, that we may hear theirs as well. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com Designer Baylink RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24 St Petersburg FL USA http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274 A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?

Jay R. Ashworth wrote: As the person who wrote that {{yesterday}} template allow me just to say a big "ditto". I agree that alot of this 'stuff' would be better handled in the MediaWiki software... but I'm not going to hassle the developers to implement this feature and that feature and the other feature. I take whatever they give me and use it to the limits of it's applicability. At some point, if they are useful, those implementations become widespread enough that their inefficiency is a notable issue and they are replaced with a new capability in the base system. That is happening right now for 'qif', 'calcadd', and various unit conversion templates. Yes, we could put {{yesterday}} and {{tomorrow}} and {{leapday}} and {{NextMonth}} and {{switch}} and {{if defined call}} and all the rest of them directly into MediaWiki, but we aren't there yet... adding just Tim's proposed 'if:' and 'expr:' will vastly simplify and improve the efficiency of all these existing applications. It isn't neccessary to replace each of them with a MediaWiki equivalent right now. Maybe somewhere down the line on or more of those will become as widespread as 'qif' and warrant direct implementation, but they are fine the way they work currently and would be improved by Tim's changes.

Tels wrote: 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. We don't have enough devs. 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. 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? -- Ilmari Karonen

Conrad Dunkerson wrote: In many places typing in the plain text would be much simpler. Many people use templates to impose some kind of uniformity. In these situations it takes considerable effort to root out the desired template, and determine how to disagregate the content to make it fit the template. Fine, then nobody should bitch when someone uses plain text. It's an "older method" that remains just as valid. I agree there are several of those that we could easily get rid of. Ec