https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6455
--- Comment #114 from Tisza Gergő <[email protected]> 2010-11-20 11:35:35 UTC --- (In reply to comment #110) > Experience has shown that people will just write pages that use up whatever > the > resource limits are. They'll use the functions to write still more > complicated > templates, which currently they can't write because of preinclusion size > limits. It's not at all obvious it will make anything faster, it will just > allow more complexity for the same length limit. > [...] > Maybe we should enable the string functions, but reduce preinclusion length > limit, or impose other limits on template complexity. You make it sound as if complexity would be a bad thing in itself. That is not so - complex tasks require complex solutions, most of the time. MediaWiki itself has become much more complex along the years, the editing workflow became more complex, Vector was a huge jump in the complexity of the editing GUI, and so on. Everyone accepts these as necessary, so why not the same for complex templates? Seems like a bit of NIH syndrome to me (or more precisely, Not Invented By Us, because it *is* invented here, just not by the developers). I sense a good amount of developer hubris in the debates about templates - "you should leave this stuff to us, we could do it better". Sure you could - but you could do much less of it. By the same account, we should leave writing encyclopedia articles to professionals, because they are much better at it (except that Nupedia had some 100 articles after three years). This line of thinking is completely contrary to Wikipedia philosophy. Wikipedia is about generativity, community empowerment and ultra-low barriers to entry - you can't seriously suggest that making a feature request and waiting for some developer to pick it up every time someone needs a new template would be a scalable approach. > People shouldn't have been writing programs in wikitext to begin with, they > should use proper scripts of some type -- extensions or bots or such. This gets thrown around a lot, but how those proper scripts could replace the current template system is never demonstrated. Bots are not much help with dynamic text (and do have problems of their own, like littering page histories). Extensions, as I tried to point above, are not scalable (whatever you might think of the template syntax, it is a lot easier to learn than writing secure and scalable MediaWiki extensions, and we didn't even consider yet the epic fail of code review). The conclusion of the bug about Lua was that templates using scripts interpreted by some external tool are out of the question - they have security issues, and they would break compatibility of Wikipedia with pretty much all other MediaWiki installations. What is left then? Inventing another template language and writing another parser in PHP? IIRC Werdna actually offered to do that and was turned down, because that is still not a "proper" solution. The proper solution, apparently, is to deny the Wikimedia community of a useful tool, out of purely aesthetic reasons. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
