On 02/06/2012 04:57 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 6 February 2012 15:45, Yury Tarasievichyury.tarasievich@gmail.com wrote:
All said, what are we, in fact, discussing? I get an impression everything, down to the implementation, is already decided?
You're coming in about five years into the discussion. So yes, quite a lot has already been worked on, extremely hard.
I guessed as much.
I might note, of course, that the "annual complete rewrites of the parser" have become somewhat of a fixture in this list, and that it's rather difficult to understand what's really going on from the list alone.
Anyway, five years or none, all this looks like an answer to a problem unrelated to stated. Which was, in fact, my point.
Wikitext as it exists is an indefensible mess. To the question "Would we invent this if it didn't exist?" the only sane answer is "HELL NO."
And treating wikitext as a hazing ritual to filter out insufficiently geeky editors is contemptible.
That wasn't my point, of course.
As to the "mess" you mention, it quite naturally originates in picking one of the OSS packages adequately performing in a specific role, and confronting it with an ever-expanding list of requirements, with one flagship project in mind. So, at some point things "break", or, actually, become unsufferably annoying to maintainers, but is this really related to participation figures? What about unavoidable change reliability? Well, what about wikitext operating skills acquired by the already existing wikipedians?
Sorry, if digesting this was a total waste of your time.
Yury