Tim Starling wrote:
Our goal is to deploy [Scribunto] to all Wikimedia wikis. If you don't like that idea, now would be a good time to say something.
Hi.
I believe you and I discussed the _need_ to have working interwiki transclusion before this extension sees widespread deployment. I consider this a blocker to widespread deployment. There are _a lot_ of lessons to be learned from Gadgets and I think this one is key.
(For anyone who's unaware, the Gadgets extension allows for essentially JavaScript modules to be installed on a wiki, with a user preference pane that allows users to enable and disable the modules on an individual basis. More information here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gadgets.)
Lua is going to make complex templates even more complex. It may make sense to centralize certain templates. For certain modules, it's definitely going to make sense to centralize. For other modules, it'll make less sense. Perhaps mediawiki.org will be that central repository; perhaps not.
(By the way, you can see that I'm mixing up terminology: templates vs. modules. It's still unclear to me what relationship the Module namespace has to the Template namespace. Is it intended as a supplement? A replacement?)
I don't think it was a bad idea to deploy Scribunto to mediawiki.org. It seemed kind of silly to make a guarantee that Lua won't be disabled at any time in the future, but I think you're okay with possibly looking silly if problems arise and Lua needs to be disabled temporarily. :-)
That said, Tyler is certainly right that before there is a Wikimedia-wide deployment, there should be more thought about how to best utilize and manage this new template scripting language. I'm a huge fan of organic growth (and I think a good deal of organic growth will be needed here to ensure that template monsters don't suddenly show up next week before anyone is armed and ready!), but we also need to make sure we learn from past mistakes and experiences. I think the Gadgets evolution is the best (i.e., closest) model to study, but there may be others to study as well.
Auto categorization, manual categorization, and a few other administrative features are missing (yes, I'll file bugs at some point). We also need better/smarter documentation (including a glossary of terms). But most of these issues aren't necessarily blockers to widespread deployment.
The only other possible blocker that I think has come up is the third party user issue. English Wikipedia templates in particular are horribly common on third-party wikis. I believe you did some work to ensure that Lua/Scribunto would be supported in other hosting environments, but I'm not sure of the status of this. This issue could also be mitigated by centralized modules, of course.
There were very few comments on the test2 deployment, probably because the Labs deployment served the same purpose.
From what I remember, you were the one who created test2. I've never
understood its purpose given the existence of test[1].
MZMcBride