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

[Robert Rohde]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 1:06 AM, Martijn Hoekstra
<martijnhoekstra at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> 4. Block the creation of new templates with deprecated syntax. Also block
> saving templates that were free of deprecated syntax would an edit
> introduce deprecated syntax.
<snip>

Strictly speaking this is impossible.  While there are some common
cases that could be recognizable on a per template basis, there are
other cases that are only recognizable as problems when placed in the
context in which the are used.

To give a ridiculous example:

A template {{foo}} consisting of "> Nothing here <" looks innocuous
enough until embedded in a page that reads "<div{{foo}}/div>".

Because templates can contain tag, table, and other markup fragments,
the implications for the parser aren't necessarily clear until the
template is used in context with other elements.  So one could
identify this as an issue when saving the page that uses it, but there
is no general way to identify all templates that might be problematic
at the time the template is written.

-Robert Rohde