Board Thread:Policies/@comment-1038387-20180506105530/@comment-3361105-20180507012041

Koavf wrote: Alt text should be mandatory anyway whether or not it helps SEO. This is a perfect example of a single admin saying self-contradictory things about policy-on-a-whim.

Mandatory according to whom? It exists in the mediawiki infrastructure, but it is not in any way a requirement to display an image, nor as anyone in any authority declared its use to be mandatory, to my knowledge. I see no contradiction. It's certainly nice to use alt-text as an accessibility option for the blind.

I am okay at MediaWiki templates, not great at Lua. Anyone has any rite to complain about something being wrong or broken&mdash;how else do you think things get fixed? Everyone who submits a bug report needs to also be able to fix the bug? Where are you getting this?

I wouldn't necessarily class a Wikia/Fandom employee failing to follow our instructions, producing a company mandated template for us in an unintuitive coding language, and then abandoning us to deal with it ourselves a "bug" - but I have certainly made multiple requests over the years to get help from someone who can resolve our issues. No help was given.

Can you give me more perspective on how/why Wikia hates parsers? (e.g. a citation or explaining their reasoning)

They don't necessarily hate parser functions. They hate expensive parser functions. Here's a little context. Ultimately, it means that the system load caused by forcing the platform to check to see if the other page exists is high, and both affects the server capacity and load-times for users. A page with multiple #ifexists or #switch functions is especially problematic. Essentially, the point is that they like Lua better for its compatibility with mobile and for its marginally faster load-times. When Billy was working for Wikia/Fandom a few years back, they outright told him that they hate when we use expensive functions like ifexist, and - back on subject - they also specifically complained very much about the size of our Batman disambigs and gallery pages, because they took too long to load, because of all of the images.