Topic on User talk:PPelberg (WMF)

I happened to run into old discussion and saw you insert text from a previous post using Green text at: https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Vu677lvei5djiprb&topic_showPostId=vujqrrp6lhr6hidt#flow-post-vujqrrp6lhr6hidt

I liked this so much I decided to see how you did it, so clicked the View history tab on top of the page to locate your edit but, lo and behold, your edit was made on September 17, 2020 but the history goes back only to 18 September 2020. Is there a way to go further back than that? Thanks in advance,

Also in case this is of interest to you @PPelberg (WMF), I have just clicked on the history of another page where I had contributed content just before, and had to edit it for an obvious mistake ,which I would have detected had I had the option of previewing it, but the history does not show any of my recent coontributions.

He used the {{Tq}} template to make the text green. You can see this in the wikitext if you click the three dots menu ••• at the top of his individual comment, and switch to the wikitext mode (pencil icon next to the blue Reply button) if you're in the visual mode. Flow is not in active development, so I don't think that previews will be added.

@Whatamidoing (WMF) Re template:Tq :

I was hoping to find your answer again when the need arose on another wmf-wiki. Unfortunately it appears not to exist there. Some day maybe the wmf will put a package together of all useful templates with documentation for those wikis that don't have the manpower to write/document/maintain/export templates.

Thanks

I think the thinking has been going the other direction (for simpler uses, like text formatting): Instead of spreading templates, why not make things easier to do in wikitext?

@ Whatamidoing (WMF)

Do you mean Structured data across Wikimedia?

No, that's something else. To use the template we're talking about ("Tq"), the thinking is more like: Why should anyone have to use a template for that? Why not use the existing works-everywhere <mark> tag (which highlights: example) or create a class (similar to the "class=wikitable" that we put at the start of all tables) that works everywhere?

I always thought the use of html tags was discouraged on wmf-wikis?

The software doesn't care, and most editors don't usually care for most syntax, either. I wouldn't recommend it for tables (before wikitext tables were created, using HTML codes was the only way to create a table, and it is very ugly), and I'd expect editors to swap out bold and italics, but for the most part, I don't think people care.