It's interesting to think about how complex the wikipedia text is compared to something like github flavored markdown or even standard html tables (although I guess it eventually renders into standard html so it's not more complex than the latter when all other html elements are considered in addition to <table>)

For example the swatch internet time infobox is dynamically updated

{{short description|Alternate time system by watch maker Swatch}} {{Infobox | image = [[File:Swatch beat Logo.svg|200px|alt=Logo of Swatch Internet Time]] | caption = Logo of Swatch Internet Time | title = Time{{efn|at page generation }} {{purge|(update to view correct time)}} | label1 = 24-hour time (UTC) | data1 = {{nowrap|{{#time:H:i:s}}}} | label2 = 24-hour time (CET) | data2 = {{Time|CET|dst=no|df-cust=H:i:s|hide-refresh=yes}} | label3 = .beat time (BMT) | data3 = {{nowrap|@{{#expr: floor( {{#expr:{{#expr:{{#expr:{{#time:H|now + 1 hour}}3600}}+{{#expr:{{#time:i}}60}}+{{#time:s}}}}/86.4}} )}}}} }}

It's basically wordpress era PHP templating.

I always found it ironic that the table syntax is designed to resemble ascii-art type tables, and then literally nobody writes it in a way that looks like an ascii art table.

Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

But the spaces around | make it easier to read, than, say, CSV.

Honestly it continually surprises me how people forget about TSV

It's the perfect format, more or less! CSV, but no difficulty around commas, and the only major risk being an editor that converts tabs to spaces

I agree it's great, but that risk is so major that I stopped using it. "There's a 50% chance that your editor will invisibly corrupt the data you enter, and another 30% chance to corrupt the entire file" is just not usable...

Especially in Zed where the only way to switch hard tabs is buried in the settings menu, and impossible to change per buffer.

Lack of control over your editor's behaviour shouldn't be acceptable on this level. Just like making tabs/spaces visible, control like this ahould be a basic feature of every editor.

You'd think more editors would be smart enough to recognize that it's a TSV file and therefore should preserve the tabs, in much the same way that you'd think editors would be smart enough to recognize that something's a Makefile and therefore should preserve the tabs.

> Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

For now. I get the feeling we'll have tooling everywhere that does this soon.

I was recently tab-completing a Markdown table and whatever autocomplete model I had just fixed the table up without any intervention.

Yeah, it’s not terribly hard to do that even without AI (Prettier can do it, for example). But there’s a lot of places where the tooling just isn’t available. Then again, it’s probably not a big deal if your GitHub comment markup isn’t perfect.

I think the root of the problem is, almost everything else you use in Markdown is easy to do by hand. There’s just no good syntax for tables like this, I guess.

I’ve spent countless hours at employers fixing Xwiki syntax errors mixed with HTML. The parsing engine must be complex

That's putting it lightly, since Mediawiki templates are Turing-complete.

I'm not up to speed on my parsers anymore, but I believe Parsoid remains the most complete implementation, while mwlib is a reasonable compromise.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers#Known_imp...

I just went back to check whether I have a sandbox on Wikipedia. Turns out I do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Susam_Pal/sandbox

I am not a regular contributor to Wikipedia but the little time I have spent contributing there has exposed me to its very elaborate culture, with barnstars being one artefact of that culture, alongside policy acronyms everyone seems to know by heart, WikiProjects organised around every imaginable topic, userboxes that are little badges that say something about you, etc.

By the way, I added a few userboxes for the Logo programming language, in case there are any Wikipedians out here who happen to love Logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:User_logo

Tried to edit on my mobile (T-Mobile - US) and got this:

  Your IP address has been blocked     from editing Wikipedia.

  Blocked by Xaosflux

  Block will expire in 7 months

Curiosity led me to Xaosflux's Wikipedia page where I see they have been active since 2005 with over 85k edits!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Xaosflux

I've had the desire to contribute so many times, but each time I was blocked. I don't think Wikipedia accurately measures how much contribution they lose because of the hostile treatment of new editors and what I believe are poorly implemented editing policies. Their policies likely haven't been revised since a decade or more, they should do a survey about it.

I'm not trying to defend Wikipedia at all costs, but you should also think about how much spam and trolling would happen on their platform if they didn't have these annoying blocks for non-registered users.

I run a pretty simple SaaS with a free tier and the amount of spam that I have to manage is high; I don't want to even imagine how difficult it must be to run a website where anybody can edit pretty much anything.

in most cases you should be able to create an account and edit even if your IP address or range is blocked

Unfortunately large IP groups like mobile phones often need to be blocked because it’s the only possible way to constraint anonymous spammers.

Pretty much all wikis would have a "Sandbox" page for trying out that particular wiki's individual syntax and features.

I'd wager that most wikis use the MediaWiki software, which is what Wikipedia runs on.

One particular thing that comes to mind though, is that Fossil (https://fossil-scm.org/) has a private local-only sandbox: https://fossil-scm.org/home/wikiedit?name=Sandbox. It saves to your browser's persistent storage, but never on the server.

There are both, every user has their own sandbox. But this one is there to encourage first time visitors and the uninitiated to make changes , so they know that anyone can contribute uninhibited.

Though, just to be clear, the per-user ones are also public. They're just a convention where if you make a subpage of your user page and call it "Sandbox", nobody is going to complain about the encyclopedic value of your edits.

If you really want something private, there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ExpandTemplates (or of course just hit preview and dont save)

True , though I just discovered category scans still hit your user sandbox. Kind of silly