On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Tyler Romeo tylerromeo@gmail.com wrote:
This is the exact kind of attitude the op-ed in the Signpost is addressing. When making major feature decision, such as redoing the entire templating system, we cannot just say to editors "oh, if you want some input, go and join our mailing list". That's just a passive-aggressive way of pushing editors out of the conversation. How many purely editors, i.e., not developers, are on this list actively participating in discussion?
And this isn't a technical decision, it's a requirements decision. We're not deciding what algorithm to use, or what object design to implement, we're deciding what features would be best for the users of Wikipedia. The reason this extension was implemented (hopefully) was so that users could have a better templating experience, but how can you possibly assume to know what is best for the user without asking the users themselves? And no, we cannot be expected to consult every language wiki, but on the other hand we cannot completely ignore the community and suddenly launch this new extension on them as if they'd known about it for years.
*--* *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2015 Major in Computer Science www.whizkidztech.com | tylerromeo@gmail.com
I think its a little late for this. I'm pretty sure there was discussions with (template editor) users about lua years ago. The whole lua thing has literally been in discussion in some form or another for probably at least 5 years.
From what I understand lua was not chosen just randomly by throwing a
bunch of languages in a hat, there were many requirements, such as sandbox-ability, performance concerns, and ease of implementing resource limits, etc. If I recall lua came out the clear winner.
-bawolff