On 2/11/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
How much of this task is possible without looking at
the code base?
How much can be done merely by inspection? Would it be possible for
someone (Brion, yourself?) to structure this apparently very large
task in such a way that non-developers like me would be able to
contribute bite-size pieces of work? Such a task might look something
like "Define the grammar for the [[Category:...]] statement". Do we
have anything like that?
Well, the ideal is to get as much of the grammar as possible
formalized, not merely informally summarized. Formalization should be
possible with some inspection and testing, but of course you have to
have a good understanding of formal grammars (I don't, for one, at
least not yet). There are a number of wiki pages scattered around
Meta and
MediaWiki.org containing attempts at formalizations, which of
course anyone can contribute to.
On 2/11/07, Steve Bennett <stevagewp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Just to check: Is changing MediaWiki sytnax absolutely
out of the
question?
Major changes are probably out of the question for the foreseeable
future, just because of the annoyance of transition, with months and
months of people using the wrong syntax and screwing up articles.
Tweaks to the behavior in corner cases are, of course, fine.