Dear Wikitext experts,
please, check out Sztakipedia, a new Wiki RTE at: http://pedia.sztaki.hu/ (please check the video first, and then the tool itself) which aims at implementing some of the Visions you described here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future/Parser_plan (the RTE part)
Some background: Sztakipedia did not start out as an editor for Wikipedia. It was meant to be a web-based editor for UIMA annotated rich content, supported with natural language background processing. The tool was functional by the end of 2010, and we wanted a popular application to demonstrate its features, so went on applying it to Wiki editing.
To do that, we have made some wiki-specific stuff: -After checking out many parsers, we have created a new one in JavaCC -Created lots of content helpers based on dbpedia, like the link recommendation, infobox recommendation, infobox editor help -Integrated external resources to help editing, like the Book Recommendation or Yahoo-based category recommendation
Sztakipedia is right now in its alpha phase, with many show stoppers, like handling cite references properly, or editing templates embedded in templates, etc...
I am aware that you are working on a new syntax, parser and RTE and they will eventually become the official ones for Wiki editing (Sztakipedia is in Java anyway).
However, I still think that there is much to learn from our project. We will write a paper next month on the subject and I will be honored is some of you read and comment it. The main contents will be: -problematic stuff in the current wikitext syntax we struggled with -usability tricks, like extracting the infobox pages to provide help for the fields, showing the abstracts of the articles to be linked -recommendations, machine learning to support the user+ background theory
Our plan right now is to create an API for our recommendation services and helpers and a MediaWiki js plugin to get its results to the current wiki editor. This way I hope the results of this research - which started out as a rather theoretical one - will be used in a real world scenario by at least a few people. I hope we will be able to extend the your planned new RTE the same way in the future.
Please, share with me your thoughs/comments/doubts about Sztakipedia.
Also I wanted to ask some things: -Which is the most wanted helper feature according to you: infobox/category/link recommendation? External data import from the Linked Open Data? (Like our Book Recommender right now which has millions of book records in it?) Field _value_ recommendation for infoboxes from the text? Other? -How do you measure the performance of a parser? I saw hints to some 300 parser test cases somewhere... -Which is the best way to mash up external services to support the Wiki editor interface (because if you call an external REST service from JS in mediawiki, it will be cross-site scripting I'm afraid)?
Thank you very much, Best Regards Mihály Héder MTA Sztaki, Budapest, Hungary