[Wikimedia-l] On the gentrification of Wikipedia, by Superbass

[Mark]

On 7/30/13 6:40 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:
> 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.
>

 From an editing perspective, it seems what's wanted here is a way to 
mark regions of text, and then to specify what processing is done on 
this region. As you note, {{foo|giant parameter consisting of the whole 
region}} is one way to do that, but currently doesn't work technically, 
and looks a bit weird syntactically. Perhaps some kind of 
region-definition could be a first-class supported feature?

-Mark