On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 2:39 PM, Ryan Kaldari rkaldari@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hey Tyler, Many of these issues have already been discussed on this mailing list. Read Rob and Tim's emails from last week to start with. As explained in the previous emails, the extension being deployed is Scribunto. Regarding performance testing, Rob said this would be done once the extension was deployed to mediawiki.org: "From there, we'll need some time figuring out the performance characteristics of this (making sure we're actually coming out ahead) as well as converting some key templates over." Many of the other questions are covered at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Scribunto.
And not to be overly dismissive, but the idea that Tim needs to prove that en.wiki wants this feature is absurd. The template system on Wikipedia is BROKEN. It takes over 30 seconds for the parser to render large articles, and articles with a really large number of citation templates can't render at all, they simply error with a timeout. The only reason Lua/Scribunto was developed is because the en.wiki community has been vocally complaining about this problem FOR 3 YEARS. Check out https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19262 for example.
Ryan Kaldari
Furthermore, mediawiki.org is a community essentially owned by the developers, not to mention this feature is non-user facing. If people don't want to use it, they don't have to.
I do believe consensus should be sought when enabling extensions like moodbar and what not on enwikipedia, but this is nothing like that situation.
--bawolff