“We have just launched this site… please send us your feedback!” When we added these words to the top of 1/5th of the mobile pages, we began a barrage of feedback to the mobile list. So much so that, we had to make a second list just for this kind of feedback. That certainly wasn’t unexpected and my fiancee, Michael Lintorn, has been fantastic about responding. He’s spending his summer answering about 150 messages to the list a day, ensuring that everyone knows that we are actually human and making sure we get all the weird bugs taken care of.

What I didn’t expect, was how many people absolutely, totally misunderstand the link. I would change the link to be more clear, but I’m not really sure how I can make it more clear without it just being a list of caveats the average person wouldn’t read.

However, the silver lining here is that we get a whole bunch of really hilarious messages where people are obviously not understanding A) What Wikipedia is, or B) What planet we are on.

Enjoy.

Hey I’m looking for a pic of the rood inverse with the inscriptons around it, if you can e-mail it to me I would really appreciate it. Thanks guys and keep up the good work

Oh, yes sir! We’ll get right on that.

Hey razor.I was just watching some boxing on tv and I thought about you.do you remember me from the time you bought your rv at independence rv in florida.my name is ### and I was the one who got your rv ready.as I remember I think you came back and traded 2 or 3 times in a row.you asked me if I liked working on rv’s and I made the joke. I guess it beats getting the crap beat out of you for a living.haha.any how I hope that large family of yours is well and your invention works out.take care

Razor, if you are out there. Please contact this person. He misses you.

This is great can you tell me where I can buy the whole series

Oh, its on Aisle 3.

Can’t find def for bafoone

Try another spelling.

Love your show. My wife & I watch every weekday.
Thanks for being a great great great great great American!

Yes, in my spare time I’m *am* a TV producer. Its one of the many hats we all wear at Wikimedia.

Best of luck this Friday.
Bob the window cleaner (just a normal guy like you)

Us regular guys have to stick together. And thanks for the goodluck wish. I could use it!

Why did he get Fired now will watch only ###LOCAL#STATION### news

Local news is the WORST. Politics, politics, politics.

I was looking up some health related stuff and would have preferred to
have a way of not being forced to see it. For example, when you go to
the page about jaundice, you imediately see a picture which looks
creepy when it fills up the small screen…

I do agree that all gross diseases should only have pretty people in the example pictures.

I would like to know more about the high sugar content caused by
cortisone injections and whether  or not it’s reversable by diet. The
cortisone is for arthritis which many people suffer from. I was hoping
to get a more detailed info pack for this with diet tips. I only had
three large doses but it has raised my sugar very high and I want to
counteract it. Would be glad if some of this was on site as I know you
did mention cortisone. However the site was a bit involved and I could
not really decide into wwhich category I was fitting!!! Thanks though
for a generally helpful site

Our medical staff will be back to you with this advice shortly.

Anyhow, I hope some of these made you smile!

Hampton Catlin, Mobile Development Lead

As many folks have noted, our current templating system works ok for simple things, but doesn’t scale well — even moderately complex conditionals or text-munging will quickly turn your template source into what appears to be line noise…

<includeonly><span style="white-space: nowrap;">{{#if:{{{3|}}}|
{{coord|{{{1|0}}}|{{{2|0}}}|{{{3|0}}}|{{{4|N}}}|{{{5|0}}}|{{{6|0}}}|{{{7|0}}}|{{{8|E}}}|{{{9|type:other}}}|format={{{format|dms}}}|display={{#if:{{{title|}}}|inline,title|inline}} }}| {{#if:{{{2|}}}|
{{coord|{{{1|0}}}|{{{2|0}}}|{{{4|N}}}|{{{5|0}}}|{{{6|0}}}|{{{8|E}}}|{{{9|type:other}}}|format={{{format|dms}}}|display={{#if:{{{title|}}}|inline,title|inline}}}}| {{#if:{{{4|}}}|
{{coord|{{{1|0}}}|{{{4|N}}}|{{{5|0}}}|{{{8|E}}}|{{{9|type:other}}}|format={{{format|dec}}}|display={{#if:{{{title|}}}|inline,title|inline}}}}| {{#if:{{{1|}}}|
{{coord|{{{1|0}}}|{{{5|0}}}|{{{9|type:other}}}|format={{{format|dec}}}|display={{#if:{{{title|}}}|inline,title|inline}}}}}}}}}}}}</span></includeonly><noinclude>
{{pp-template|small=yes}}
{{documentation}}
</noinclude>

And we all thought Perl was bad!  ;)

Lua

There’s been talk of Lua as an embedded templating language for a while, and there’s even an extension implementation.

One advantage of Lua over other languages is that its implementation is optimized for use as an embedded language, and it looks kind of pretty.

An inherent disadvantage is that it’s a fairly rarely-used language, so still requires special learning on potential template programmers’ part.

An implementation disadvantage is that it currently is dependent on an external Lua binary installation — something that probably won’t be present on third-party installs, meaning Lua templates couldn’t be easily copied to non-Wikimedia wikis.

There are perhaps three primary alternative contenders that don’t involve making up our own scripting language (something I’d dearly like to avoid):

PHP

• Advantage: Lots of webbish people have some experience with PHP or can easily find references.
• Advantage: we’re pretty much guaranteed to have a PHP interpreter available.  :)
• Disadvantage: PHP is difficult to lock down for secure execution.

JavaScript

• Advantage: Even more folks have been exposed to JavaScript programming, including Wikipedia power-users.
• Disadvantage: Server-side interpreter not guaranteed to be present. Like Lua, would either restrict our portability or would require an interpreter reimplementation. :P

Python

• Advantage: A Python interpreter will be present on most web servers, though not necessarily all. (Windows-based servers especially.)
• Wash: Python is probably better known than Lua, but not as well as PHP or JS.
• Disadvantage: Like PHP, Python is difficult to lock down securely.

Any thoughts? Does anybody happen to have a PHP implementation of a Lua or JavaScript interpreter?  ;)

– brion

Update:

Hampton reminds me that Ruby has some sandboxing features and may also be a contender.