MediaWiki extension request thread

[DroneBetter]

I am not sure whether this will be listened to, since (as far as I know) there are no extensions used thus far, but I will begin.

In my time editing the LifeWiki, I have several times been burned by my own hubris and had a Firefox/operating system crash that caused my next loading of an open tab with an active edit to show that no changes were conserved in the cache. Most recently, this affected (among various smaller other things) a considerably large edit to my page, User:DroneBetter/miscellaneous curiosities, in which I had found and meticulously formatted many new formulae and two long collapsible proof sections for these, that I had been making without backing up to a permanent local file, all gone now, which has demotivated and distressed me somewhat.

In the forums, we have the draft system, and MediaWiki has the Drafts extension, which is similar in nature but also allows automatic saving, after 120 seconds of inactivity since an edit. It would significantly improve my life henceforth and I presume those of several others who are alike me in this regard.

I think it would also benefit from either the Math or MathLaTeX extension, since galoomba recently made me aware of a discussion in the lounge regarding the OCA:Rule 120 page (also my contribution) being difficult to read, it turned out that Moosey had in fact misinterpreted its misrendering (on what I can only assume to be a portrait mobile device with small page width) as its intentional appearance. The source formatting is also not pretty, I used deeply nested <span>s and did all of the spacing manually with invisible-font alternating periods and spaces, all to emulate what could each have been single LaTeX cases statements, which seem most appropriate for the kinds of mathematical analysis contained thereupon.

I have created some templates for use in my userspace pages and the wider wiki; {{frac}}, {{choose}}, {{sum}}, {{product}}, {{sqrt}} and {{lim}}, however they too suffer from many issues; I was quite pleased with getting {{frac}} to work for nested (ie. continued) fractions and arbitrarily tall numerators and denominators, but cannot make {{sqrt}} do similarly, so only one degree of nesting of radicals is allowed at a time (which has been a problem for me a few times); {{choose}}'s brackets are normal-sized, since one cannot make characters taller without making them thicker correspondingly.

A friend of mine once told me that one can generally tell whether a wiki contains any interesting maths by whether it uses LaTeX, and I am afraid we're falling behind in this regard.

Others are welcome to ask here for other extensions to be added also, I'm not sure whether it's on the schedule but we got this very forum recently and dvgrn told me over direct messages that there will be a separate main page news section (or even perhaps a separate main page altogether) for OCA discoveries instead of being mixed in with the Life focus of the main one (so it is clear that the administrators have awoken as of late from their usual deep and enigmatic slumbers :-).

[confocaloid]

[...] In my time editing the LifeWiki, I have several times been burned by my own hubris [...] which has demotivated and distressed me somewhat. [...]

[...] I think it would also benefit from either the Math or MathLaTeX extension, [...]

Personally, I don't see a real need for additional extensions to enable new markup. On a Life/CA-related wiki aimed at hobbyists and other people curious about topics that are in the scope, overly detailed technical writings are unnecessary, and likely belong elsewhere.
I can also see how enabling such markup can cause more harm than good, by enabling new kinds of unnecessarily obscure writing.

[...]
A friend of mine once told me that one can generally tell whether a wiki contains any interesting maths by whether it uses LaTeX, and I am afraid we're falling behind in this regard.
[...]

I think there are two possibilities. Either they didn't quite understand themselves what counts as "interesting maths". Or they weren't quite honest.
Interesting mathematics doesn't need complicated formulas. It is sufficient to understand the topic well enough to be able to successfully explain it to a curious reader.