On 8/22/12 2:01 PM, Risker wrote:
I hear what you're saying Ryan - although in fairness there is some history there, and also some very significant challenges on all sides to actually communicate. However, one has to keep in mind that sometimes the definition of "end user" can be pretty different. On reading this thread, I have the sense that lots of people commenting here see template creators/curators as the "end user" - but they aren't in any conventional sense. The end user is the person who actually uses the template.
I imagine most templates won't actually change at all. The main purpose of Lua/Scribunto is to replace the nightmarish under-the-hood uber-templates templates like Citation/core with something that isn't so nightmarish. Most templates just do simple parameter substitutions and if/else decisions and don't require any real programming language functionality. Templates that have very complex behavior, however, are extremely difficult to implement in WikiText (and very expensive to parse), and there are only a small handful of people who work on these templates. We should certainly recruit those editors to help us test Scribunto now that it's on mediawiki.org. Getting buy-in from them will be critical to the tool's success. As one of the editors who works on templates like Citation/core, I'm personally very excited about the project so far, and can't wait to see it in production.
Ryan Kaldari