On Tue, Sep 2, 2014 at 12:00 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org
wrote:
That would take a more detailed look at what is
actually trying to be
accomplished with these dialogs. For example, enwiki's Teahouse[1] has a
dialog for newbies to more easily post questions, but it's implemented as a
gadget that generates the form specific for that page. To what extent to we
have actual use cases for many differently-designed dialogs? How does the
lisp even enter into the current design?
The part about lisp, perhaps I've addressed in the other message I just
posted (though it seems to have gone off with a distressing number of typos
in it). And as for looking at examples of dialogs --- I agree, and I
/don't/ have examples, exactly because this ****storm over superprotect has
been precipitated by the Foundation /before/ I'd really intended to go
widely public with my tools. I've decided people should be aware of what
I'm doing even though I'm not quite there yet, but honestly, the primary
route I'd always envisioned, to convince people that my ideas were viable,
was to /demonstrate/ it, by building the tools and then starting to use
them to build wizards. This is what has always worked best for me in the
past: if I can see the potential in a low-level tool, the best way to show
others the potential I see is to make it real. It's taken me an appalling
amount of time (three years) to develop the tools, partly because at every
little step in the design I've stopped to consider the implications for
practical applications (like the difference between carving a statue by
hand-and-eye with a hammer and chisel, versus pouring cement into a mold).
Which I suppose is another part of my contention that design decisions
about wikis should be made in the field.