On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 4:57 PM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
Evidently not, as you are ignoring that text fidelity and preserving pages are considered important.
Because they aren't. The goal is transcribing the pages easily and accurately, and having one wiki page in exact correspondence with each text page is only one means to that end, which has both advantages and disadvantages. It's very easy to get so wrapped up in a solution that you don't realize that an entirely different approach is better. This is particularly so when the current approach was developed by a community that largely had to work with the software they were given, while we're software developers and have the option of improving the software.
(Most obnoxious possible responses to a bug report: "Oh, what you want is just stupid, you don't *really* want that, you want this other thing instead which is nothing like what you asked for.")
Most annoying possible type of bug report: "Please fix the half of my problem that makes no sense." http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/03/23/558887.aspx Bug reports need to state what the ultimate problem is that they're trying to solve, not explain intermediate goals that make little sense by themselves. Once the ultimate goal is stated, the best response is sometimes to suggest adopting an entirely different means of solving the problem. The developer is often in a good position to say "This weird special thing you're asking for is unreasonable, but if I implemented this other feature that other people would also find useful, wouldn't that solve your problem too, if you took a step back and thought about what you really want this for?"
In this case I don't see a particularly better solution than the one proposed, offhand. But in general, implementing features just because people request them, without demanding concrete use-cases and considering what the best way to solve them is from the perspective of the software, is a recipe for writing software that's a mess of special-case hacks. We have enough of that in MediaWiki already.