Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-27111365-20151125051412/@comment-24473195-20151125091948

N1FFO wrote:

Dessamator wrote: If you're a developer, a good approach would be to use Help:Lua. Wikitext is a never going to be readable if you use parser functions that add "programming"  behaviour to wikipages.

The alternative is either html comments or tags... . Thanks for the Lua tip. I'm not sure it's appropriate for me to go to that level, since I'm only a contributor to the SWUprising wiki, not the creator of the wiki. I don't want to confuse the other contributors. It would also require me to learn a new language, though that's not so difficult.

I tried the tag, but it doesn't work on articles, only in templates. The arrays I'm using are only useful in the particular article I'm editing, so I need a solution that works in articles (since I wouldn't care to create a template that's only used on one page). I guess that leaves HTML comments... Templates also help reduce cryptic code that other editors may find confusing. So even if it is only used in one page it is better to add it to a template.

I think that the arraydefine parser function is complicated enough that only people with a programming background or people who take the time to research will ever understand it. Not to mention that people can easily accidentally break the code more easily if it is included in an article.

At some point I included such code (using the variables extension) in a page but eventually decided against it because it made the page harder to read and  maintain. I've also read that extensions like variables and arraydefine break caching and negatively affect the performance of the site.