[Foundation-l] Fwd: How do you fully consult the community consensus?

[Chad]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:11 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 8:06 PM, Robert Rohde <rarohde at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 6:15 PM, Brian<Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
>> <snip>
>> > I really like the ParserFunctions example. Enabled with hardly any
>> > discussion and now used 500,000 times on the English Wikipedia. It had a
>> > major effect on Wikipedia that made it much harder to use. And now we are
>> > stuck in a programming mindset and we all assume that we all agreed to
>> come
>> > here. It just isn't the case. You won't be able to find where that
>> agreement
>> > happened.
>>
>> The initial parser functions were a replacement for {{qif}} and kin.
>> The enwiki community had already adopted a significant degree of
>> programming in template space.
>
>
> The developer that abused templates so that qif could be written does not
> constitute a consensus. The conversations regarding programming on Wikipedia
> were extremely limited given their impact.
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Of course you're not going to see massive community-wide discussions
on the intricacies of wikitext and template programming. Most people
don't care enough, as long as it works.

{{qif}} was being used massively, even if the majority of the community
didn't know about it (or care). It supported their work and allowed them
to do the things with templates that they needed in articles. I would
argue these complex templates came from the community's needs.

ParserFunctions then came along because {{qif}} sucked.

-Chad