First in this thread. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> Date: 6 Apr 2008 22:09 Subject: Random "how the world feels" from London PM To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org> On Thursday night, I went to London PerlMongers social drinks and guzzled ridiculous quantites of Adnam's Oyster Stout and talked rubbish with geeks. Minor anecdotal notes on our public relations with the advanced geek crowd: * They really wish MediaWiki had decent WYSIWYG editing - Wikipedia's wikitext is so full of template code it repels casual editors. I explained the technical problems ("it's not a parser, it's a twisty maze of regexps" - they recoiled in horror) and that we're working on it. (Current status: promising vaporware.) They want WYSIWYG editing because they want to be able to say "no" to installing Confluence, which is horrible to administer and not much better to use. * I told the story of why MediaWiki is written in PHP. (Magnus had read up on PHP to make some changes to NuPedia code, and decided he needed a project. So Phase 2 is Magnus' first ever proper PHP program ...) * They really want machine-readability from Wikipedia. The infobox templates on Wikipedia are getting there. Mostly what they need is standardisation (is the image called "image", "Image" or "Img"?), and a base template that's {{Persondata}} or a reasonable approximation. This is a matter of parser-functions in the template wikitext on the 'pedia, but it's something someone needs to take on as a project: to re-plumb the templates without breaking the nice exposed external interface. Who knows parser-function code and is feeling ambitious and patient? - d.