On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 04:13:05PM +0200, Tels wrote:
Moin,
Huh? Excuse me: "Moin is the name of another wiki software, occasionally considered to be competitive with MediaWiki. Are you using it's name here repeatedly as a form of address to be provocative?"
No, I use it as a form of greeting since like, oh, a decade.
Does it mean something, in one of the 25000 or so languages I don't speak?
On Friday 07 April 2006 04:27, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 06:42:51PM +0200, Tels wrote:
Exactly, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a distributed programming contest, whose ouput accidentily looks like an encyclopedia :)
But, as is frequently pointed out, Mediawiki is not *only* wikipedia, even if you only take WMF projects into account.
Yes, that was my point, too. How do you intent to distribute all the wonderfull little "code-snippets" written on wikipedia to other wikis?
I'm becoming more and more certain that you're merely trolling;
I hope not. :-( I am writing about these issues because I see problems arise and want them to be avoided before it's to late. Handwaving and "I dont see this as a problem" will not make problems go away, and I'd rather have a discussion about potential designs and solutions _before_ they are implemented.
Ok, that's fine. But the things you say you see as potential problems just... well, I can't see how they *could* be problems -- to the people potentiall implementing the extensions *or* the people running wikis -- and I say that with almost 25 years of systems analysis and design as a background.
People will take advantage of any tool you provide them to accomplish their own work -- but there is no *global* problem of managing *those templates* (the ones which take advantage of the proposed new extensions), because they are all effectively private.
Someone may choose to *start* a repository of such scripts/templates, orthogonally to the people who create them, and subject to licensing, and that would potentially be a neat idea (though it might merely be another branch on meta), but it's not necessary to justify *adding* the extensions in any fashion that I can perceive.
this question is completely orthogonal to the issue at hand, and appears to be merely intended to be provocative as well.
No, it is an issue I consider very important. There is a difference between adding something like {{yesterday}} as a feature to the mediawiki software, or creating a template for it. In the later case you get all sorts of issues, like I described earlier.
And yet, AFAIK, {{yesterday}} *is* a template. If it isn't now, it certainly started as one, and that's the old cycle: you implement the feature you need with what you have, and if it's useful and inefficient, you then push it down into the core.
As I said before, these requested features should be added to the software side, and not be created by creating a new template-language with all the problems that arise from that.
I hope that clears it up.
It does, but I disagree with you. Your suggested approach ("everything people want should be implemented in the core, immediately") does not scale well at all, and therefore will pinch off useful development by people who *are* equipped to build complex templates, but are *not* equipped to write PHP code.
That is obviously a Bad Thing to me.
Again: it's penalising the smart people.
You haven't, as far as I can see, provided a cogent argument as to why it's good. Hopefully, I have clarified both my point of view and my perception of yours, and some other folks will also jump back on this bandwagon, that we may hear theirs as well.
Cheers, -- jra
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