[Commons-l] Template:Flickr

[Gregory Maxwell]

On 8/24/07, Florian Straub <flominator at gmx.net> wrote:
> I just changed http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Flickr to now use
> {{information}}.

A good step.

> Maybe that would give us the change to occasionally "subst" it in order to
> receive a "normal" description page:

This is the direction I'd like to go.

> Otherwise machine reading could rescursively read the templates and get the
> information from the fields as well.

No it can't. ... not reasonably. The only way to reliably recurse in
anything external is to have a copy of all the templates, and to
implement a full mediaiki parser. The only truly complete parser is
the (rather slow) one in MediaWiki. ...

You can try to handle the cases in a third party parser, but you'll
always be chasing your tail: People constantly change our markup and
templates ... and the only standard they apply is how it looks in
mediawiki. :(