Olivier Beaton wrote:
Thing's I'd like to see in extensions and shipped with the default install (maybe not each item in it's own, a lot of these could be grouped)
I think you're being too bold here (eg. Special:Statistics but keeping the statistics core). Although I agree that most of those maintenance reports special pages deserve being rewritten using magic categories. Similarly, for special pages Export and Import, I oppose to remove the interfaces just for removing. It's almost as silly as having to install an Android app just to be able to set the proxy in your browser (real sample!). And for others, such as Watchlist, it isn't as simple to split as they are more highly tied, although there may be a benefit there in doing it.
Why maintain two different places for special pages and their translations?
I don't consider this an issue for translations. Admins aren't expected to edit the php files.
Chad also joked about making the parser an extension, and I'm no expert on it but given how much trouble WYSIWYG editors are having with our wiki syntax, I wouldn't mind being able to say "yeah sure this is a wiki from scratch, I'll accept the CKeditor syntax instead" and have one that works great (and has show source!) Especially if I could mark all current pages as using Parser A, and new pages or edits get converted to Parser B.
I don't think it's as difficult as people think. You just need to provide a parser with the same interface providing the different dialect and enable it with $wgParserConf