[WikiEN-l] Citizendium vs. Wikipedia

[Gwern Branwen]

On Thu, Apr 23, 2009 at 1:40 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> [cc'ed to mediawiki-l]
> [from wikien-l - discussion of git-backed MediaWiki]
>
> 2009/4/23 Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com>:
>
>> As it happens, I've thought about this before and have a little
>> expertise in the issue. I'm one of the developers of a wiki called
>> Gitit - http://github.com/jgm/gitit/tree/master - written in Haskell.
>> The most interesting thing about Gitit, besides its ability to export
>> articles (written in Markdown or ReST) in various formats such as HTML
>> or PDFs or LaTeX, is that it uses a library called 'filestore'  -
>> http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/filestore -
>> to access and change articles.
>
>
> While the idea of putting lumps of PHP into an otherwise Haskell
> project is really quite horrifying, the parser that (literally)
> defines MediaWiki wikitext could to some degree be made into a module
> for use elsewhere. I understand it's not entirely cleanly separated
> out in the MediaWiki codebase, but if you could do that you'd at least
> have something that quite definitely processed MediaWiki wikitext
> precisely as MediaWiki does.
>
> This might be better for mediawiki-l ...
>
>
> - d.

The library/executable actually doing all the translating, Pandoc, has
a relatively limited MediaWiki capability - it's just output, as I
said, not input. It's much easier to take your intermediate
representation language and turn it into a small subset of correct
MediaWiki markup (omitting such things as templates, which don't exist
in Markdown & ReST) than it is to parse the wild-and-wooly world of
MediaWiki files (as many projects have discovered to their dismay).

-- 
gwern