Well, its just an idea. I'm not going to bet my house on its acceptance. But, here are
some thoughts why it might work.
Mediawiki powers an awful lot of wikis, some used by businesses that cannot afford
instability in its operation. It is in their interest to ensure it remains maintainable.
So, they might be willing to provide some funding. In addition I'm sure Mediawiki is
used by some parts of the government (both US and other countries), so there might be some
funding available through those channels.
As to whether it is an interesting challenge, I agree writing a new parser in and of
itself isn't. But, reengineering a heavily used software product that has to keep
working during the process is a significant software reengineering headache. I once worked
on a system that attempted to do that and we failed. It took us 10 years to transition (we
actually got it into production for while) and by that time everything had changed. They
ultimately through it away. The grand challenge is to do "rapid" software
reengineering.
In regards to the 2%, you could stipulate that the solution must provide tools to
automatically convert the 2% (or the vast majority of them).
Anyway, its only an idea. I think the biggest impediment is it requires someone with both
a commitment to it and significant juice to spearhead it. That is probably why it
wouldn't work.
--- On Tue, 7/14/09, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Is this the right list to ask questions about parserTests
I suspect nobody's going to stand a chance without
funding.
$ cat includes/parser/*.php | wc -l
11064
That's not the kind of thing most people write for an
interesting challenge.
Also, you realize that 2% of pages would mean 350,000 pages
on the
English Wikipedia alone? Probably a million pages
across all
Wikimedia wikis? And who knows how many if you
include third-party
wikis?
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