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

[James Forrester]

On 30 July 2013 13:58, Mark <delirium at hackish.org> wrote:

> 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?
>

​That'd be great, yes (and really easy to do using Parsoid's DOM) - we
could do annotations, comments, content collapsing, etc. - but I can't see
how it would work with wikitext in a way that would leave it
sanely-editable for users. I'm not sure we want to start building features
that only for work VisualEditor users at this point.

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

jforrester at wikimedia.org | @jdforrester