On Fri, Apr 07, 2006 at 04:13:05PM +0200, Tels wrote:
Moin,
Huh? Excuse me: "Moin is the name of another wiki software,
occasionally considered to be competitive with MediaWiki. Are you
using it's name here repeatedly as a form of address to be
provocative?"
No, I use it as a form of greeting since like, oh, a decade.
Does it mean something, in one of the 25000 or so languages I don't
speak?
On Friday 07 April 2006 04:27, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
On Thu, Apr 06, 2006 at 06:42:51PM +0200, Tels
wrote:
> Exactly, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a distributed
> programming contest, whose ouput accidentily looks like an
> encyclopedia :)
But, as is frequently pointed out, Mediawiki is not *only*
wikipedia, even if you only take WMF projects into account.
Yes, that was my point, too. How do you intent to distribute all the
wonderfull little "code-snippets" written on wikipedia to other
wikis?
I'm becoming more and more certain that you're merely trolling;
I hope not. :-( I am writing about these issues because I see problems
arise and want them to be avoided before it's to late. Handwaving and "I
dont see this as a problem" will not make problems go away, and I'd
rather have a discussion about potential designs and solutions _before_
they are implemented.
Ok, that's fine. But the things you say you see as potential problems
just... well, I can't see how they *could* be problems -- to the people
potentiall implementing the extensions *or* the people running wikis --
and I say that with almost 25 years of systems analysis and design as a
background.
People will take advantage of any tool you provide them to accomplish
their own work -- but there is no *global* problem of managing *those
templates* (the ones which take advantage of the proposed new
extensions), because they are all effectively private.
Someone may choose to *start* a repository of such scripts/templates,
orthogonally to the people who create them, and subject to licensing,
and that would potentially be a neat idea (though it might merely be
another branch on meta), but it's not necessary to justify *adding* the
extensions in any fashion that I can perceive.
this
question is completely orthogonal to the issue at hand, and appears to
be merely intended to be provocative as well.
No, it is an issue I consider very important. There is a difference
between adding something like {{yesterday}} as a feature to the mediawiki
software, or creating a template for it. In the later case you get all
sorts of issues, like I described earlier.
And yet, AFAIK, {{yesterday}} *is* a template. If it isn't now, it
certainly started as one, and that's the old cycle: you implement the
feature you need with what you have, and if it's useful and
inefficient, you then push it down into the core.
As I said before, these requested features should be
added to the software
side, and not be created by creating a new template-language with all the
problems that arise from that.
I hope that clears it up.
It does, but I disagree with you. Your suggested approach ("everything
people want should be implemented in the core, immediately") does not
scale well at all, and therefore will pinch off useful development by
people who *are* equipped to build complex templates, but are *not*
equipped to write PHP code.
That is obviously a Bad Thing to me.
Again: it's penalising the smart people.
You haven't, as far as I can see, provided a cogent argument as to why
it's good. Hopefully, I have clarified both my point of view and my
perception of yours, and some other folks will also jump back on this
bandwagon, that we may hear theirs as well.
Cheers,
-- jra
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
--
Jay R. Ashworth jra(a)baylink.com
Designer Baylink RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates The Things I Think '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://baylink.pitas.com +1 727 647 1274
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing on Usenet and in e-mail?