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A comment on Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on Wikipedia.

Re:Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on... by rurban on Monday April 23, 2018 @05:20AM (#16901817)
As the major other php wiki implementor, phpwiki, I can add my input to this.

I've implemented such an ajax page preview and also a page inliner (for expanding page trees via ajax) about 10 years ago. It was major work, because you essentially send a stripped down page in xml, so it needed some architectural changes to separate the various page templates properly. In the end it needed 2 months work. phpwiki has a proper template design and its plugins cannot ever destroy a page layout or harm security.

mediawiki on the other side is horribly undesigned spaghetti code, with no proper templating and plugin integration, so it needed a few years more. It's like parsing html with regexp.

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Re:Why it took a long time to build the tiny link preview on... by ckoerner on Monday April 23, 2018 @10:02AM (#16903447)
> mediawiki on the other side is horribly undesigned spaghetti code

But like my mom's spaghetti, it's my favorite. :)

Think you can make it better? https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us

I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, but this subtle snark is my own, and may not reflect the views of the Foundation.

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