that are not wikisource? As the Technical Wishes team at Wikimedia Germany is currently working on the Cite extension, I had a look to find an answer to your question. The follow="…" feature was introduced in 2010[1] as part of the Cite extension, the extension responsible for the <ref> and <references> tags. The feature was never designed to be turned on or off per wiki, and can't be turned off. In case a wiki does not want to use it, and make sure it isn't used, I suggest to either use an "insource" search[2] on a regular basis, or possibly talk to the users running the Check Wikipedia project[3] to add a scan for the follow="…" parameter to their list. Best Thiemo [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/rECITb5883ddc36f8ee270f555ad73ac5fa00cf1b… [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:CirrusSearch#Insource [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Check_Wikipedia _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

The wikitext snippet you posted appears to be seriously broken. More precisely: It is unbalanced. Technically, there is no such thing as "broken" wikitext. The parser will always output something (as he does in the example). However, this doesn't mean such wikitext is ok. Sure, nobody is stopping anyone from writing unbalanced code. But it becomes unpredictable (as the example shows), unreliable, and effectively unmaintainable as it starts to heavily depend on quirky internal details of the parsers implementation, how it approaches certain aspects, and in which order they are processed. The bigger problem here is this: Even if you figure out how the parser works right now, it might change, as it already did many times. Have a look at pages like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec to get an idea of how complex this topic is, and how many people tried how many times to nail it down, all failing for one or the other reason. Code like the one you showed depends so much on the tiniest implementation detail of the parsing process, it becomes so fragile that it might break any day for reasons nobody could ever anticipate without a warning. Please balance your wikitext. Best Thiemo _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

I expect from the parser to parse wiki markup before parsing html tags […]