[Wikipedia-l] Quality vs Quantity

[David Gerard]

On 29/04/07, Berto 'd Sera <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:

> Yes, that's your main problem in a small wiki. You also have to get people
> use to that idiotic wiki-markup (WHEN will we have a NORMAL WYSIWYG?????)


This is a vexed question. The technical reason is that MediaWiki
markup doesn't have a specification - the specification is, quite
literally, the PHP code in the parser.

There have been various attempts to write the specification out in
EBNF format. However, this is actually mathematically *impossible*. So
all such attempts at doing so have gotten to 90% and died.

Put it this way: liberate MediaWiki from the PHP parser code and the
devs will worship you.


- d.