On 2/11/07, Steve Bennett stevagewp@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@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.