Just sent this to wikipedia-l and foundation-l - I figured they would be good places to ask.
- d.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Date: 17 Nov 2007 12:05 Subject: New parser in the works - please help To: wikipedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l
Wikitext-l was formed from a recent discussion on wikitech-l about the need to sanely reimplement the current parser, which is a Horrible Mess and pretty much impossible to reimplement in another language.
The MediaWiki parser definition is literally "whatever the PHP parser does." Some of what it does is arguably very wrong, pathological, magical or just a Stupid Parser Trick. So the list has been formed to come up with a grammar that defines all the useful parts of the present parser, and so can be used by anyone to implement a MediaWiki wikitext parser. This will be useful for other software, for WYSIWYG editing extensions ... all manner of things.
Some of what some people would think of as a "stupid parser trick" is in fact important - e.g. L'''uomo'' which renders as L<i>uomo</i> (necessary for French and Italian).
So: we need to know what MediaWiki quirks are supporting important constructs in languages other than English (which is the language the list is in, and is the native language of most of the participants), and particularly in non-European languages.
This list is unlikely to implement new features, e.g. (an example brought up by GerardM) the double-apostrophe in Neapolitan. But we really need to know about present important features that wouldn't be obvious to an English-speaker going through the present parser code.
- d.