Hoi,
In the past the existence of templates in one wiki has been used as an
argument to not accept an extension. With extensions you have functionality
that is indeed intended to be external to ordinary users but you are talking
about functionality that can be tested. With templates you have stuff that
can adn does severely impact performance and is at the same time not usable
on other systems.
While it may be so that you can not effectively contribute to an article on
something esoteric as the "ten commondmanets in Roman Catholocism", it might
be possible for you to translate it in another language if you have the
language skills. With the way templates are I would not touch them with a
barge pole if I can help it. Templates are however the only tool we consider
for things like info boxes and stuff. They are as a result quite important
from a functional point of view. From a usability point of view they are
horrible.
In conclusion, templates are used and they prove to be problematic. The best
proof of this is the recent performance issues we had.
Thanks,
GerardM
2009/6/26 Gregory Maxwell <[email protected]>
> On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:01 PM, Gerard
> Meijssen<[email protected]> wrote:
> > Hoi,
> > At some stage Wikipedia was this thing that everybody can edit... I can
> not
> > and will not edit this shit so what do you expect from the average Joe ??
>
> I can not (effectively) contribute to
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments_in_Roman_Catholicism
>
> Does this mean Wikipedia is a failure?
>
> I don't think so. Not everyone needs to be able to do everything.
> Thats one reasons projects have communities: Other people can do the
> work which I'm not interested in or not qualified for. Not everyone
> needs to make templates— and there are some people who'd have nothing
> else to do but add fart jokes to science articles if the site didn't
> have plenty of template mongering that needed doing.
>
> Unfortunately the existing system is needlessly exclusive. The
> existing parser function uses solution are so byzantine that even many
> people with the right interest and knowledge are significantly put off
> from it.
>
> The distinction between this and a general "easy to use" is a very
> critical one.
>
> It's also the case that the existing system's problems spills past its
> borders due to its own limitations: Regular users need to deal with
> things like weird whitespace handling and templates which MUST be
> substed (or can't be substed; at random from the user's perspective).
> This makes the system harder even for the vast majority of people who
> should never need to worry about the internals of the templates.
>
> I think this is the most important issue, and its one with real
> usability impacts, but it's not due to the poor syntax. On this
> point, the template language could be intercal but still leave most
> users completely free to ignore the messy insides. The existing system
> doesn't because there is no clear boundary between the page and the
> templates (among other reasons, like the limitations of the existing
> 'string' manipulation functions).
>
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