It seems unrealistic to me to get try to get the full MediaWiki syntax represented in EBNF---too many grammar issues outside its abilities.
If I were you, I would start with an agreed upon subset. We had a session on this at WikiSym 2006 which lead to Wiki Creole, see www.wikicreole.org (Please note Brion was there.)
I think you might want to sync up with the Wiki Creole people, which are C Sauer and C Smith jointly with several leading wiki engine implementers.
Also, wikitech-l/research-l or wiki-standards/wiki-research seem better places for discussing this.
Finally, I hope you'll submit your results to WikiSym www.wikisym.org. We are all in desparate need of a good grammar and semantics definition.
Dirk
On 1/22/07, Alphax (Wikipedia email) alphasigmax@gmail.com wrote:
Virgil Ierubino wrote: [fixed URL]
I'm working on writing out an EBNF description of Wikitext at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikitext_Metasyntax , which I hear is much needed, but have encountered a snag. I don't think EBNF has the power to describe Wikitext. If anyone here can work out how EBNF can describe Wikitext's system for bullet points, I'd like to see it. The problem is that bullet points can build on each other, except each new level has to retain the markup from the old level, plus a new symbol. e.g. **#* then **#* * then **#** * then **#*** # etc.
If you can find an EBNF description of HTML, it would be a good place to start; in my experience, MediaWiki's Wikitext syntax is (mostly) directly translatable to HTML (eg. links turn into anchors, bullets turn into list items).
On the topic of "things that need to be done" if writing an EBNF of Wikitext isn't going to be beneficial for MediaWiki's longstanding success, I'll not bother, but is there anything that needs to be done like this to create a standard?
It /might/ be useful if you wanted to import/export between different wiki engines that use different syntax - IIRC the MediaWiki syntax is (fairly) similar to that of UseModWiki (Phase 1), but vastly different to that of eg. DocuWiki. However, I wouldn't rate it very high on the priority list.
-- Alphax - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax Contributor to Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia "We make the internet not suck" - Jimbo Wales Public key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alphax/OpenPGP
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