On Thursday night, I went to London PerlMongers social drinks and
guzzled ridiculous quantites of Adnam's Oyster Stout and talked
rubbish with geeks.
Minor anecdotal notes on our public relations with the advanced geek crowd:
* They really wish MediaWiki had decent WYSIWYG editing - Wikipedia's
wikitext is so full of template code it repels casual editors. I
explained the technical problems ("it's not a parser, it's a twisty
maze of regexps" - they recoiled in horror) and that we're working on
it. (Current status: promising vaporware.) They want WYSIWYG editing
because they want to be able to say "no" to installing Confluence,
which is horrible to administer and not much better to use.
* I told the story of why MediaWiki is written in PHP. (Magnus had
read up on PHP to make some changes to NuPedia code, and decided he
needed a project. So Phase 2 is Magnus' first ever proper PHP program
...)
* They really want machine-readability from Wikipedia. The infobox
templates on Wikipedia are getting there. Mostly what they need is
standardisation (is the image called "image", "Image" or
"Img"?), and
a base template that's {{Persondata}} or a reasonable approximation.
This is a matter of parser-functions in the template wikitext on the
'pedia, but it's something someone needs to take on as a project: to
re-plumb the templates without breaking the nice exposed external
interface. Who knows parser-function code and is feeling ambitious and
patient?
- d.