recursion

I've been struggling with MediaWiki templates for a new wiki I am trying to launch, and so reading Wikimedia Proves Greenspun's Tenth Law which suggests that MediaWiki templates may be turing complete made me chuckle.

These things are insane and MediaWiki is totally getting out of hand. At this point, a limited sub-set of HTML with some sort of scripting/template language would have been preferable. And the documentation for the templates is terrible.

Check out the template docs.

Here's an example template:

{{call|={{{1}}}|{{{2}}}=x0|1={{{2}}}|2={{{3}}}|3={{{4}}}}}

WTF? This code looks like brainfuck. And that's a simple one.

Here's the template that produces the company infobox. Look at that source code!

But I guess mainly I'm just bitter because I can't get conditionals working.