Here's some feedback from the point of view of sombody trying to use Parsoid for the first time. Hopefully it can be taken as constructive to help make it easier for new people to get involved, sorry if some of it will seem nitpicky ...

- MediaWiki and node.js are cross-platform. Some of us are crazy enough to use it on Windows but the docs are Unix-centric
- npm works great on Windows but stuff like "curlhttps://npmjs.org/install.sh | sudo sh" does not
- Can parsoid currently be used without a local mediawiki install? this instruction makes it seem that it cannot yet talking to people make it seem like it should work. Confusing:

Go to the Parsoid/js/api directory and create a localsettings.js file based on localsettings.js.example. In particular, make sure that you useparsoidConfig.setInterwiki to point to the MediaWiki instance(s) you want to use.

- Can you point to a remote MediaWiki instance or must it be local? Can you leave it out?
- export NODE_PATH=node_modules is Unix-centric - what should Windows users do?

- The docs jump straight into "running the tests" - this doesn't seem very interesting to people trying out parsoid for the first time - at least without much introduction. - It seems too "internal". Why not start by showing people how to convert a wikitext string directly from a command line? That's more likely to get somebody hooked.

- "npm test" does seem to work great on Windows without "export NODE_PATH=node_modules"

- my test results were (with a week old repo): 1854 total passed tests, 1107 total failures

- I think we should downplay stuff that makes it look like a mediawiki install is needed

- I think we can promote that it should work cross-platform

Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail)