Wikiphant

From LordMattWiki

This is or has been made an Elephant Hunt subsection. The Elephant Hunt deals with the short comings in systems including: Anti-patterns, code smells and support issues.

wikiphant is a special kind of elephant. One designed to run a wiki.

[edit] Wikipedia and mediawiki

The wikipedia is the king of wiki's in the minds of hundreds of people. The reson for this is that it works.

But it works for the wrong reasons.

In truth it's parser is a massive elephant. It is written too rigidly do one single job and each bug is patched very carefully untill out ball-of-mud approach works very well.

It is not easy to tamper with at all and even the maintainers are growing tired of it we hear (see below).

In the 1.6.1 release of the parser at line 1708 there is a comment that says "Oh man I hate our multi-layer parser!"

It is not, as is common on elephant hunts, that ego is the problem but, like the parser, the mediawiki and wikipedia is a layer cake of epic scale.

Huge respect is deserved by anyone able to maintain something that bulbus.

It is the wiki that (currently) powers this wiki. But it has a heard of 'phants running about in there. Albiet a very tame one.