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

[Ziko van Dijk]

It's interesting how an essentially social question (being welcoming to new
people by a Visual editor) turns quickly into a debate on software.
Ziko



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ziko van Dijk
voorzitter / president Wikimedia Nederland
deputy chair Wikimedia Chapters Association Council

Vereniging Wikimedia Nederland
Postbus 167
3500 AD Utrecht
http://wikimedia.nl
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


2013/7/30 James Forrester <jforrester at wikimedia.org>

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Wikimedia-l mailing list
> Wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> <mailto:wikimedia-l-request at lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>