On 02/06/2012 04:57 PM, David Gerard wrote:
On 6 February 2012 15:45, Yury
Tarasievich<yury.tarasievich(a)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