On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 8:48 PM, Subramanya Sastry ssastry@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 08/03/2016 07:17 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
In our planning meeting (E250), we discussed this issue as a possibility for next week's ArchCom office hour (E259). We don't (yet) have a specific RFC we can point to, but this seems ripe for a discussion to answer whether we should work toward a spec. Thoughts?
Works for me.
Excellent!
I can take the email I posted, clean it up a bit, and also pull additional thoughts from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:SSastry_(WMF)/Notes/Wikitext and elsewhere that are relevant. The idea I have is to provide a very high level view of what one possible spec might look like, and what that might enable.
Or, should I pull together something else that might be useful to guide the discussion?
I suspect User:SSastry_(WMF)/Notes/Wikitext is a really good explanation that I suspect will be a good explanation for people who have deep understanding of parsers and our parsing infrastructure. I say "suspect" because I'm operating from a point of someone whose knowledge of our system is wide and shallow.[1] I fear that we're coming from a wide enough set of perspectives about wikitext that we're doomed to talk past each other, despite ample preparation.
Perhaps a good place to start for our 2016-08-10 conversation is with this page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec
As of this writing, the last really substantive addition to that page was in 2010. Maybe we can have a discussion about what should reside at that URL, and where the content currently on that page should go.
Of course, it would be a lot more fun to have a celebration about how awesome that page had become in the past week after I sent this email. That probably won't be because I made the first (or any) edits to the page ;-)
Rob
[1] Like the Platte River, which traveling pioneers described as "a mile wide and an inch deep" and "the most magnificent and useless of rivers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_River#cite_ref-188