#WCN11 - #MediaWiki gadgets

At the #Wikimedia Conference 2011, one of the best bits of news was in the presentation of Roan and Timo. They have been working on the rejuvenation of our JavaScript support, this brought us a lot of improvements in the past and now they have their sites firmly on the MediaWiki gadgets.

In summary, the syntax to support gadgets is worse then wikisyntax on steroids, the same gadget may exist in a gazillion manifestations on any of the 800 Wikis, internationalisation is a joke, gadgets as they are are awful. Awful because its infrastructure sucks not because of a lack of hard work by a community of people fulfilling a need.

Consequenrly the syntax has to be cleaned up, gadgets are to be shared among the many wikis, it should be able to use all the JavaScript improvements and as gadgets are to be shared, internationalisation is necessary in order for it to work well on all those Wikis.

The best news; Roan and Timo are already testing gadgets with many of the improvements in place. The gadgets are able to use MediaWiki messages and Siebrand and Roan are talking about implementing gender and plural support for JavaScript.
Thanks,
       GerardM