Ah, I thought it was the Lua extension (made sense to me at the time :P). Thanks for pointing that out.
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.
But there's a difference between an issue and a solution. Yes, the templating system is broken, and I'm sure many an editor will confirm that, but just because a system is broken does not mean Lua is automatically the solution. To put it in other words: just because people want a better templating system does not imply they want Lua. What discussion, if any, has there been that WMF wikis want Lua as their templating replacement. As said before, mediawiki.org is mostly developers, so there's no problem with that, but with the op-ed on the Signpost, we should seriously question whether the community wants this feature before randomly forcing it on them.
*--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 3:17 PM, bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com wrote:
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
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