[Wikipedia-l] Re: Modest proposals

[Uri Yanover]

> And, of course, as Lee already pointed out, it also makes it less tempting
> for the casual user. A very important argument.
There are 24000 articles now that don't use aliases; they're relatively
difficult to set up, and so it's not likely for them to become a major
subject of abuse.

> Perhaps the user wants this to happen, perhaps not. I suggest we first
wait
> and see how many people actually need such features.

_I_ need this feature. I also feel that bringing subpages back from the dead
the way this proposal stands is wrong

> > As to runtime performance concerns, I'm sure that caching and/or
> > an optimised parser could do wonders in the Wikipedia case.
> > Wiki markup is _very light_.
>
> Have you seen the parsing code? There is nothing _very light_ about it, at
> the moment. I intend to improve that in the future, but found some other
> problems I would like to solve first. Anyway, adding non-trivial features
is
> not going to make that job easier.

I must admit that I did not see the code; however the wiki markup is really
simple, compared to most other markup and general-use languages out there.
High-performance parsers exist; I believe that eventually the Wiki parser
will match them.

If we really want to improve performance, perhaps we should simplify
some syntax structures (e.g. doing ISBNs through links
[ISBN 200145-3453|this way]), write a formal grammar and then
write a parser in C (or some other high-performance language) to
reflect that formal grammar. But I digress :-).

Sincerely yours,
                Uri Yanover