Thread:Project:Support desk/Radically rethinking template syntax? (2)/reply (3)

Hmmmm, OK, neither of these is really what I'm suggesting. Extension:Lua is adding an entire programming language and, as far as I can tell, Wikitext.next is trying to rewrite the whole damn wiki markup syntax, with one of their intentions ultimately being to make everything constructible from a GUI, which IMO is simply impracticable. Extension:Winter, meanwhile, not only keeps the current hard-to-read syntax but also adds the power of an entire programming language, which, as the page notes, is potentially a huge security hole.

What I'm suggesting is something that
 * 1) Is cleaner and easier to use than the current syntax;
 * 2) Supports abstraction in a way that doesn't place extra load on the server (expansion is done once, when the template is saved, not each time it's loaded);
 * 3) Does not add any additional power, so no security holes, and in fact can be converted to the existing syntax, as soon as the template is saved;
 * 4) Hence, will not break anything, add security holes, or introduce complex and hard-to-understand interactions with other parts of this system;
 * 5) Hence, and most importantly, is something that realistically could actually be made a standard part of Wikipedia.

This last point is most important at all. My interest is not merely in creating an extension that some people could enable on random little wikis, but specifically in helping Wikipedia, and so, without something like this becoming a standard, there is (from my perspective) no point.

So I guess my question is, where does the discussion of improvements to the software underlying Wikipedia go? I haven't seen any serious discussion anywhere of attempts to fix the current sorry state of template programming, but I can't believe no one has thought of this; at the current pace, the template system will soon become completely unmaintainable. Benwing 05:43, 12 May 2011 (UTC)