Hm. Sounds like an opportunity. How about Mediawiki issuing a grand challenge. Create a
well-documented/structured (open source) parser that produces the same results as the
current parser on 98% of Wikipedia pages. The prize is bragging rights and a letter of
commendation from someone or other. I suspect there are a bunch of graduate students out
there that would find the challenge interesting.
Rationalizing the parser would help the development process. For the 2% of the pages that
fail, challenge others to fix them. They key is not getting stuck in the "we need a
formal syntax" debate. If the challengers want to create a formal syntax that is up
to them. Mediawiki should only be interested in the final results.
--- On Tue, 7/14/09, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
They're supposed to pass, in theory, but never
have.
Someone wrote
the tests and the expected output at some point as a sort
of to-do
list. I don't know why we keep them, since they just
confuse
everything and make life difficult. (Using the
--record and --compare
options helps, but they're not that convenient.) All
of them would
require monkeying around with the parser that nobody's
willing to do,
since the parser is a hideous mess that no one understands
or wants to
deal with unless absolutely necessary.
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l