Congratulations! This is one of the 52 proposals that made it through the first deadline of the Wikimedia-Developer-Summit-2016 selection process. Please pay attention to the next one: > By 6 Nov 2015, all Summit proposals must have active discussions and a Summit plan documented in the description. Proposals not reaching this critical mass can continue at their own path out of the Summit.

November 6, and this proposal doesn't seem to have much traction, it is not on track. Unless there is a sudden change, I will leave the ultimate decision of pre-scheduling it for the Wikimedia-Developer-Summit-2016 to @RobLa-WMF and the Architecture Committee.

Part of the reason why I hadn't chimed in here yet .. even though this is very much what we (the Parsing Team) are interested in is because a lot has to happen in the individual RFCs linked here. But, on the other hand, it is useful to have an umbrella and think about this coherently and a bit more longer-term in terms of how we want wikitext to evolve. So, this would be a useful session to think about this beyond just the various specific tweaks.

Towards that end, here are some possible metrics against which we can evaluate ideas and proposals.

1. How does it affect ability to write tools for wikitext editing?
2. How does it affect ability of DOM-based editing tools like Visual Editor, Context Translation?
3. How does it affect ability to reason about wikitext (for humans looking at wikitext, in the presence of various markup errors that are inevitable)?
4. How does it impact performance of parsing wikitext?
5. How does it affect the complexity of parsing wikitext?
6. What about all the old revisions out there?

So, editability, performance, complexity, consistency, backward compatibility concerns need to be kept in mind.

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