[OSM-talk] Lua modules are here: Improving OSM wiki templates

[Yuri Astrakhan]

Hi everyone.  Thanks to Tom Hughes, we now have Scribunto extension set up
on OSM wiki, which allows Lua language in addition to the very slow and
unreadable wiki template language.

Documentation:
* https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Scribunto/Lua_reference_manual
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lua

Benefits:
* Much better performance compared with wiki template language
* Substantially more readable
* Allows greater flexibility with how templates are set up

Migration:
The usual migration is to re-implement complex and often-used templates in
Lua (as a Module:* pages), and keep the existing template as a "wrapper" -
a one-liner with {{#invoke:mymodulepage|mymodulefunction}}.  This way
existing pages do not need to be changed, but get all the performance
benefits.

Template info:
Create a "doc" sub-page, e.g.  Module:<my_module>/doc  and put all the
documentation there.

Testing:
I would advise to create "unit tests" for the complex templates. The
simplest way is to create a   Module:<my_module_page>/doc   page with a
table of all possible usages of the module, There is also a good practice
page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lua#Unit_testing

Once again, thanks Tom for helping with this!
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