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

[James Forrester]

On 30 July 2013 04:36, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 1:01 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > On 30 July 2013 09:06, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > 6. Announce a date from where on saving a page with a transcluded
> legacy
> > > template will be blocked. Expect public outcry.
> > > An important consideration that all developers must keep in mind is
> that
> > > though the current syntax is quite horrible, it also serves a purpose,
> > and
> > > though its existence in itself is quite horrible, the fact that it is
> > > widely used is completely reasonable.
> >
> >
> > The question then will be how to keep parsing old versions reasonably.
> > I suppose we could keep an old wikitext parser around. *shudder*
> >
> > (Or just punt the question into the long grass. Do old page versions
> > pull in contemporary versions of the page's templates or use the
> > current versions? If the latter, then heh, too bad.)
> >
>
> This *sounds* horrible, but is exactly what happens now. If a template
> changes, old revisions break. I suppose that if MediaWiki would go for a
> change in template semantics, an option besides letting them break, is to
> substitute all 'legacy' templates into their parents last revision before
> the changeover. How many revisions back one would want to do this and in
> what timeframe sounds like a discussion point, but I don't see this as a
> far more broken process than template changes cause right now.
>

​That's what we did last time we switched how templates work (the MW 1.2 ->
1.3 transition)​
​. "Template syntax conversion bot"​ (or whatever) spidered across the
corpus and created a new top revision as needed, IIRC.

​J.
-- 
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester at wikimedia.org | @jdforrester