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

[Erik Moeller]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 4:00 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> Are there any wikitext constructions that are actually going to be
> deprecated?

We don't know yet. We try to support almost everything. In addition to
the unbalanced templates that Marc mentions, there are templates that
literally insert individually meaningless bits of markup (e.g.
style="color:#ccc;'' class="foo"|Bar, which is partially table markup
and partially CSS) into another context like a table or image
thumbnail syntax. Especially when talking about widely used templates,
we try to support those constructions in Parsoid -- but if community
members are open to changing templates and/or template-invoking pages,
that will help at least in the short term. We do try to provide
information to this effect in bug reports. And yes, these kinds of
uses of templates do make the devs cry. If you listen closely when
it's quiet and still, you can hear them wail.

In the long run, we may have to announce some markup as deprecated,
and some of the crazier template uses seem likely candidates. At some
point when we switch to the new parser, it would then just stop
behaving as with the current MediaWiki parser implementation, with
appropriate warning. We're still a long way from that, though.


-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation