On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 2:32 AM, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
Special pages are nice because they have a base class with lots of features. They are flexible and easy to add.
The main problem with actions is that most of them are implemented in that horror that is Article.php.
This is from a developer's perspective, not a user's. I was only really thinking about user-visible consistency. From that perspective, I think it's clear that using only special pages with no actions would be an improvement. I don't think the URL differences need to be reflected in the code. If you really liked, you could implement the special pages as wrappers around the current code, so the special page just called the same Article method as now (maybe with a bit of refactoring).
(I know Aryeh makes up his mind about things like this rather faster than I do; I look forward to his reply which will no doubt tell me all the reasons why he's not changing his position.)
Happy to oblige.