[Wikimedia-l] On the gentrification of Wikipedia, by Superbass (was: Visual Editor)

[David Gerard]

On 29 July 2013 23:41, Marc A. Pelletier <marc at uberbox.org> wrote:

> Nostalgia for the "good old days" of hand-spun wikitables with baroque
> hacked together syntax notwithstanding.


MediaWiki wikitext should indeed be set on fire and put in a bin and
fired into the sun, with any other horrible and termina fates we can
think of. (Though ten billion words of legacy content is a pretty good
reason we can't do that.)

But one of the unfortunate things about the way the VE rollout's gone
is that it's led to people building castles the present
otherwise-indefensible disaster of MW wikitext. When what they really
need is assurance that a fully capable markup of some sort will
remain.

Are there any wikitext constructions that are actually going to be
deprecated? With a defined set being what is supported? (Some of which
will be [[spandrel (biology)|]]s from wikitext literally being defined
as "what the PCRE code in PHP happens to do", but which editors will
have come to rely upon.) Will said set be developed with extensive
consultation with, how are staff phrasing it these days, "grumpy power
users"?


- d.