Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-02-18/Technology report

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• "Arguments in favour of a more cautious approach centre on the propensity for templates to become ever more complex, obscuring their methods to the average user." I'm very concerned about that. If code gets too complex, only a bunch of people will be abled to edit Wikipedia. --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:07, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Template code is already at that stage; there's very few people willing to touch the things. Apart from being better for the servers, Lua can't be worse in programmability - David Gerard (talk) 19:11, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
  • I think the opposite will happen. Lua code (or code in any other half-decent programming language, for that matter) should be much more maintainable than the hacked together template "programming" language we use now. Lua code has more readable syntax, can more easily include documentation and comments and abstractions such as functions and modules should also help a lot to improve readability, re-usability and maintainability. —Ruud 19:51, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Templates are already an unreadable mess of almost-code. If we had this rollout 2 years ago I would've said the same thing. Remember that if you give software developers anything that looks like a programming language we'll try to develop in it. Much better to have an actual language than a mess of nested (and confusing) templates driven by curly braces and key-value relationships. Protonk (talk) 23:09, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
• I propose that there be a category (perhaps Category:Articles with geographic coordinates) for all articles having geographic coordinates.

—Wavelength (talk) 19:43, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

The place to discuss that would be at Template talk:Coord however the template is used on nearly a million pages so I'm not sure how useful it would be. If you really wanted to see what pages use it then you can use what links here [1].--Salix (talk): 20:00, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

• I can't find the WikiMiniAtlas icon in the planet articles. Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:14, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

Check Olympus Mons for example. There has to be a coordinate in order for the WMA to appear. --Dschwen 05:28, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

• OPPOSE LUA. All of my programming expertise will be obsolete if we don't do it with horrible template hacks any more.--ragesoss (talk) 15:56, 21 February 2013 (UTC)