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

[Brad Jorsch (Anomie)]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 11:18 PM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc at uberbox.org> wrote:
> On 07/29/2013 11:10 PM, Risker wrote:
>> which are used daily on hundreds of pages,
>> and they serve a very important function.
>
> Yeah, but they are duct tape over weaknesses/flaws in wikimarkup, not a
> valuable feature.

Templates such as {{hat}} and {{hab}} don't exist so much because of
weaknesses in wikimarkup as because passing the content as a parameter
would rapidly exceed the Template argument size limit, and possibly
other parser limits. Any solution to this "problem" would have to take
that into account, unless the vaguely mentioned "new parser" doesn't
have such limits.

There's also the fact that a {{hat}}/{{hab}} pair can be clearer than
{{hidden|text= with }} 2000 lines further down in the text. Although I
suppose the comeback to that is that people using VE don't see such
things.

> This revolves back to the difficulty in trying to
> pretend a talk page in wikimarkup is a discussion medium and doing
> "forum" kind of things with it.

Not entirely. Templates such as {{hidden begin}} and {{hidden end}}
are used to hide long lists in a way that Flow is unlikely to
satisfactorily support. While HTML markup for multi-column lists is
trivial enough to enter directly in a page, people still like to use
templates such as {{div col}} / {{div col end}}. And it's not long ago
that {{col begin}} / {{col end}} were required to give a (hacky)
cross-browser multi-column layout. Nor does this address the
"succession box" templates mentioned above.