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

Marc A. Pelletier marc at uberbox.org
Tue Jul 30 02:58:36 UTC 2013


On 07/29/2013 10:02 PM, Rschen7754 wrote:
> If I'm reading this right, it *would* cause massive problems on the English Wikipedia

Oh, it *would* if the syntax was just disabled outright!

Now, if it were me that was in charge of fixing wiki markup, this is
what I would do:

(a) require that syntactic elements opened in a template be closed in
that template during transclusion* (without a change in code now; i.e.:
deprecate but not enforce yet).
(b) provide a mechanism by which templates which do this are
categorized/marked and otherwise findable.
(c) wait suitably long
(d) convert current invalid (according to (a) and identified by (b))
syntax by substituting still transcluded templates inline (thus not
breaking content)
(e) delete/blank/comment out those templates
(f) render the previous syntax invalid (by implicitly closing any
syntactic construct at the end of transclusion)
(g) provide a list of all the subst done in part (d) to the community so
that automated tools can fixup/convert/cleanup with new markup/LUA where
applicable.

Hopefully, whatever the delay in (c) is would need to be long enough
that the more egregious cases or complicated templates have time enough
to be transitioned manually, leaving the following subst/cleanup to take
care of edge cases and little used templates where the disruption is
nowhere as bad.

-- Marc

* This would include, indirectly, the "code fragment" templates like
Erik describe since they contain fragments meant to be interpreted in
the context of an open syntactic element** -- those are trickier to
/find/, but (f) would make them pointless.
** Making, potentially, a giant leap towards making wikimarkup
context-free which would solve so many problems with parsoid it's not
even funny.





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