WikiFunctions, I believe, has a larger purpose in the context of Wikimedia wikis, and that is they are building a library of functions that can be called directly from wikitext and the code will be evaluated automatically when the page is rendered.
I think the idea is to provide an easy way to embed dynamic content into the text of a Wikipedia article. This should provide a nice compliment to the way WikiData is used to dynamically insert data into articles.
Note: I worked for the Wikimedia foundation in the past, however, I wasn't involved with WikiFunctions. I just have some vague memories of internal product planning discussions about the feature.
The ability to invoke functions from wikitext and interpolate the result into the rendered page has been a feature of Wikipedia for over 17 years[1]. The ability to write custom functions in Lua was rolled out a decade ago[2].
> We are not competing with sites such as gist, or sites such as rosettacode.org, esolangs.org, or helloworldcollection.de, where code snippets are collected either to share them quickly with others or around a specific theme in different programming languages.
I think the idea is to provide an easy way to embed dynamic content into the text of a Wikipedia article. This should provide a nice compliment to the way WikiData is used to dynamically insert data into articles.
Note: I worked for the Wikimedia foundation in the past, however, I wasn't involved with WikiFunctions. I just have some vague memories of internal product planning discussions about the feature.