Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Wikiformat in threads/reply (10)

Then that page could simply be a template. The problem is that it's not simply "copy and paste", the relevant information must be retrieved (username, page, revision, edit, external link, date, log, etc), integrated within the template and ultimately converted in plain wikitext. Mediawiki knows how to convert by subst:ing, bots don't naturally. The bot would have to make the correct replacements, it may be possible, only bot operators would know if this can be done properly - I'm not, but I don't think it's trivial. In theory it is at least for subst:able templates by editing on any page where you can subst then retrieve the wikitext then make the edit, but it looks like a unusable hack to me. Maybe you suggest using another language than mediawiki, but this would require substantial community resources to pull together and relatively few users would have the knowledge for editing those pages.

Still, I would expect that subst: at least be usable in comments. Even so, currently many messages transclude templates, and most often those templates can't be subst:ed (at least without leaving a giant wall of wikitext and likely a few errors), it would be unpractical to translate them in another language, so it's out of question for bots to add them on their own. But it's just for bots, real users would still be left adrift in space, with bugzilla far, far away...