Stevertigo wrote: > Hm. That "crap" seems to have worked quite well for a few years now.
Hardly. The templating system has been a source of complaints and frustrations for a very long time. I remember hearing Aaron Swartz get a lot of laughter when he gave a talk at Wikimania 2006 and showed a Powerpoint slide with a screenful of templating gibberish that consisted of an huge, nested series of squiggly brackets, numerals and odd symbols. The line that drew the big laugh was when he asked if people thought that syntax was user-friendly. The current system of parser functions is actually an improvement over what existed previously, because at least it provides for an if-then statement and some rudimentary calculations and logical branching. Before parser functions existed, people used an even uglier workaround in which they achieved the RESULT of an if-then statement through a process so complicated and counter-intuitive that it would take several labored paragraphs for me to even describe it . It was because that system DIDN'T "work quite well" that parser functions were developed. They're not very easy to use either, which is why the developers are now trying to come up with a better alternative. I should mention too that a number of Mediawiki extensions have been written over the years -- Semantic Mediawiki, for example -- which are also basically attempts to overcome the limitations of Mediawiki syntax and the templating system in particular. There are also oodles of extensions that people have written in attempts to add some widget or transclusion feature to Mediawiki such as Google maps or RSS feeds. If the current system "worked quite well," a lot of those add-on extensions would be unnecessary. The fact that the current template system works poorly is no one's fault. It's a consequence of the ad hoc way that Mediawiki and Wikipedia have evolved, and of course that ad hoc evolution is no one's fault either. If everyone had waited until they had a perfect wiki platform before launching Wikipedia, the project would never have gotten off the ground. The tech people have generally performed admirably at building and maintaining the software that runs Wikipedia, and I think it's great that they're talking about ways to further improve the templating system, which could certainly use it. I think they understand all too well that it's not a good system, and they also understand how difficult it will be to come up with a better alternative. ------------------------------------------- SHELDON RAMPTON Research director, Center for Media & Democracy Center for Media & Democracy 520 University Avenue, Suite 227 Madison, WI 53703 phone: 608-260-9713 Subscribe to our free Weekly Spin email: <http://www.prwatch.org/cmd/subscribe_sotd.html> Subscribe to our Weekly Radio Spin podcasts: <http://www.prwatch.org/audio/feed> Read and add to articles on people, issues and groups shaping the public agenda: <http://www.sourcewatch.org> Support independent, public interest reporting: <http://www.prwatch.org/donate> _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
