[Wikimedia-l] Who invoked "principle of least surprise" for the image filter?

[Anthony]

On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 9:44 PM, Tobias Oelgarte
<tobias.oelgarte at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Am 18.06.2012 00:40, schrieb Anthony:
>> Is there even a way to export an article,
>> including (recursively) all the templates it depends on?
>
> Every stupid bot could do this. There is no "running out of the box"
> solution at the moment, but the effort to set up something like this would
> be minimal compared to anything else.

Have you ever tried to do this?  It's not as easy as you are making it
sound, at least it wasn't as of a few years ago, because Mediawiki is
tightly coupled to the specific database structure it uses.

> I would say that Citizendium failed because they did no automatic updating.

Well, I'm not talking about why Citizendium failed, as that became
apparent much later.  I'm talking about why they dropped the
"progressive fork" parts, which happened pretty early on.  The fact of
the matter is that forking Wikipedia and cleaning it up is more
difficult than just starting from scratch using Wikipedia as a
reference (possibly copy/pasting large portions as you go).

> What i have in mind is delayed mirror with update control. It is not meant
> to be edited by hand.

Yes.  This simplifies some things, and it makes other things
impossible (e.g. if you want to remove one line from an article,
you're stuck with removing the entire article; if you want to remove
one link from a template, you're stuck with removing every article
which includes that template, or includes a template which includes
that template, etc.)

And considering the heavy use of templates which are
Wikipedia-specific, presumably you're going to allow for *some*
hand-editing.

> It is a subset of the current content selected by the
> host (one or many users) of the page himself. It is essentially a whitelist
> for Wikipedia that only contains selected/checked content. That way a
> "childrens Wiki" could easily be created, by not including any unwanted
> content, while the effort stays minimal. (Not more effort then to create
> your own book from a list of already written articles)

Right, well, I thought this too, until I tried to do it.