Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-24473195-20150815154410/@comment-24473195-20150817213153

Penguin-Pal wrote: I sure hope nothing like this will happen http://images.wikia.com/clubpenguin/images/thumb/a/a9/MediaWiki_Emoticons_Sweat.png/30px-MediaWiki_Emoticons_Sweat.png i just like this place too much It was inevitable. Even wikipedia has changed its original gadgets/js hacks system. The difference being that admins still have the rights to give anyone permission to edit the namespace that contains the gadgets, and users can still run their gadgets in their profiles.

It is easy to think of it negatively, but look at it from another perspective. How many wikis have developed awesome gadgets in some lost silo somewhere, and nobody knows except for its admins/ contributors. Having a centralized repository with peer review could foster more gadgets and rapid development and distribution of scripts. In fact, if they are good enough, wikia can actually adopt it and add it to the mediawiki core. There are a lot of some js hacks that have been added to extensions and sometimes to core by the Wikimedia foundation developers for example.

If the system is good enough it could even enable those who are completely ignorant about javascript to run them using a single mouse click, no worrying about imports or mediawiki pages or any strange settings.

If anything the current system is a relic of the old days where everybody needed to have some technical ability to create solutions or even use a wiki (e.g. markup).