3 ms·
> We are not sure why this was overlooked, particularly in light of the project requirements described above. I can guess the actual reason for this and it amo
by noirscape 3y ago
> We are not sure why this was overlooked, particularly in light of the project requirements described above.
I can guess the actual reason for this and it amounts to "managerial pride causing NIH". It's no big secret that the WMF is so overly ambitious with the projects it works on that it would throw away any and all prior art they've already made, just to make something that seems new (not to mention that many WMF projects kinda just quietly strand and are left to rot because of that).
I really wouldn't be suprised if some manager at the WMF decided that "no, using Scribunto for this is off the table", just because Scribunto is an existing project and they wanted the project to have additional complexity (so they wouldn't have to consider the viability of the project since a "demo" would then be years out).
- zozbot234 3y agoThe whole point of Wikifunctions is to expand capabilities beyond what Scribunto/Lua provides at present. There's nothing obviously wrong with starting from scratch and adding features such as multi-language implementation or allowing for test cases out of the box, that Scribunto has never even come close to providing.
- starkparker 3y ago> The whole point of Wikifunctions is to expand capabilities beyond what Scribunto/Lua provides The whole point of Wikifunctions is to support Abstract Wikipedia. Abstract Wikipedia deemed Scribunto/Lua as irrelevant ("out of scope", specifically) to their work. The Google.org Fellows suggestion was to consider detaching Wikifunctions from Abstract Wikipedia, since Wikifunctions has value beyond Abstract Wikipedia's goals as a general-purpose community library of computing functions, but could still be used to serve the purposes Abstract wants from it. Wikimedia said no to that suggestion, so here we are.