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Allow more magic words to take a parameter
Open, LowPublicFeature

Description

At the moment, some magic words can take a parameter, yet some cannot. For example:

  1. If I use {{BASEPAGENAME|Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case}} on [[User talk:AGK]], "Arbitration" will still be returned.
  2. However, if I use {{REVISIONDAY|Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case}} on [[User talk:AGK]], the day of the last edit to my talk page—not to the arbitration requests page—will be returned.

The other magic words (in particular, the last time a page was edited) should be able to take a parameter. This bug is a request that this feature be added.

Is this feature not currently present to protect the site's performance? Should these indeed be expensive functions, we could have low cap on the number of magic words that can take a parameter on any one page. I suppose I can see that people might go overboard and make up some silly, long page that lists (on one user subpage) the last time that their "favourite" pages were edited—perhaps with <blink> tags and bgcolor:red for added hilarity. However, this feature would make life for a lot of us process junkies so much easier—and supersede the need for many of our bots (MediationBot, BAGbot, and so on).


Version: 1.21.x
Severity: enhancement
See Also:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6092

Details

Reference
bz43955

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 22 2014, 1:13 AM
bzimport added a project: MediaWiki-Parser.
bzimport set Reference to bz43955.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

Thank you for the feature request.

Do you see use cases to add parameters to other magic words than REVISIONDAY? If so, could you prepare a list?

Note: Please avoid in the future to be contemptuous with your fellow contributors. A bug tracker is a technical stuff collection, sometimes with some social impact, but absolutely not a condescension notepad.

[ Setting priority to low. ]

[ CC's asher to get feedback about performance. ]

All the "REVISIONx" magic words are obviously included in this feature request. I suppose the most sensible approach would be to consider whether any of the magic words that currently can NOT take a parameter need to stay that way. What is left over can then have this feature enabled.

Please do not patronise your peers, Dereckson. I was not being contemptuous; I was being satirical, so as to demonstrate that the case against this feature was weak. I confess I laughed at the bone-headedness of your comment; at first, I genuinely thought you were joking.

I understand from the help pages on this site that the priority of other people's bugs should not be changed, but in my experience the priority rarely matters so I am satisfied with your change.

I have been told by another user that this feature request was suggested in the course of a bug filed some years ago: 6092#c9

Auto-linkifying: bug 6092 comment 9

Thanks, from a Bugzilla newbie. :-)

What's missing now that bug 6092 has been fixed?

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:13 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: wikibugs-l-list.