Thread:Forum:Wiki Talk/Two Words: Laconic. Hovercards./reply (2)

Honestly I've been thinking about doing this for months now. Or in some form, years.

So Hovercards is based on the assumption that every article will have a good summary at the beginning, as it is on Wikipedia. But we're a little more fuc^W creative than that. Back in the days where I was still believing in a pie-in-the-sky custom wiki, I wanted pages to have a separate summary field. Something like that is still technically feasible if we used the Semantic Wiki extension, but that is an awful lot of CPU/memory use for a pretty marginal use of it.

So what we're left with is simply everything should have a laconic description. (The main pages, anyway.) At first, I got pushback from the planning forums because the Laconic sucks, and was "mainly used for jokes". But you know what? We just make it better.

I haven't investigated the core of Hovercards, but I'm guessing at some point it's just an AJAX callback. And we just replace the call to fetch $pagename to fetch "$pagename/Laconic" first, with a fallback to the original behavior.