On 9/25/09 2:23 PM, Brian wrote:
You have conveniently ignored the rest of my points,
which are not, as you
have claimed, off topic. (and you love to jump into threads and claim they
have become off topic, historically, with only the points that you are
considering being on topic.)
I felt no reason to address them since they're stuck in the tangent
discussion about redoing the entire markup system from top to bottom...
again...
My experience based on 7 years of MediaWiki development is that this
line of discussion has consistently lead to nothing useful being produced.
Rather than go in circles for the millionth time, I recommend sticking
to definable, achievable goals which can build on each other -- such as
the original topic of this thread.
To wrap them up for you:
* This will fundamentally change mediawiki and the consequences of this
feature have not been considered
The direct consequence is that in the short term we'll actually be able
to achieve the situation that normal people will be able to edit
articles containing templates.
Having this infrastructure in place further means we're in a better
position to someday make a major markup transition (say to a different
markup system or not exposing markup at all in a pure-WYSIWYG
environment)... something we're now very far from... but doesn't commit
us to any markup changes in the near or medium term.
Morever this is all based on existing discussion, knowledge, and
experience, not some sudden invention that's never been considered before.
The current work here is most directly inspired by existing systems in
the German Wikipedia's Vorlagen-Meister gadget and the Semantic Forms
extension... We're hardly creating an idea from whole cloth here; this
is real stuff that's been done before in parts and needs to be cleaned
up and modernized for Wikipedia's needs.
* We cannot evaluate the repercussions of this feature
with respect to our
broader vision for mediawiki because we (by which I mean we, not you
personally) do not have one.
Broadly, our strategy is as it always has been: to identify and
implement real, measurable benefits to the reading and editing
experiences of Wikipedia and other sites.
-- brion