Agenda
----------
- Location: #wikimedia-office IRC channel
- [Meeting type](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Good_meetings#Taxonomy): Problem definition
- Time: 2016-08-10, Wednesday 21:00 UTC (2pm [PDT](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America/Los_Angeles), 23:00 [CEST](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Summer_Time))
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikitext (and whether the movement should invest in a spec)
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsing/Notes/A_Spec_For_Wikitext and in this thread https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2016-August/086200.html
This week's office hour: Wikitext! This discussion is intended to be
a continuation of the "Loosing the history of our projects to bitrot."
thread.
Coren stated the work in front of us very well at the start of it.
> You know, this is actually quite troublesome: as the platform evolves
> the older data becomes increasingly hard to use at all - making it
> effectively lost even if we kept the bits around. This is a rather
> widespread issue in computing as a rule; but I now find myself distressed
> at its unavoidable effect on what we've always intended to be a permanent
> contribution to humanity.
The thread he started had pretty robust participation on a really
important, which seemed to us in ArchCom worth continuing the
discussion in one of our weekly office hours. So, after checking with
Subbu (in my list message) that's what ended up as the top candidate.
Subbu did some work to structure the conversation ([A Spec For
Wikitext] and I did some cleanup of the [Wikitext] page on
mw.org as a possible hub for information on this topic, with
[Talk:Wikitext] providing a durable conversation venue.
Meeting summary
---------------
* LINK: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/E259 (Krinkle, 21:00:34)
* Please note: Channel is logged and publicly posted (DO NOT REMOVE THIS
NOTE) | Logs:
http://bots.wmflabs.org/~wm-bot/logs/%23wikimedia-office/ (Krinkle,
21:00:48)
* LINK: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/E259 (Krinkle, 21:01:06)
* LINK:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsing/Notes/A_Spec_For_Wikitext
(Krinkle, 21:03:17)
* LINK:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2016-August/086200.html
(Krinkle, 21:03:23)
* subbu quotes from essay "whether we want a spec cannot be separated
from the question of what the goals are of wanting a spec"
(Krinkle, 21:06:33)
* <tgr> would the spec include stuff like "call the Lua compiler
version X with parameters Y"? (Krinkle, 21:08:43)
* <gwicke> I think it's pretty clear that a spec that would fully
address the archival use case would be extremely expensive &
probably harder to read than an actual implementation (Krinkle,
21:11:42)
* <brion> But the data model of a classic <gallery> tag is a distinct
domain specific language (Krinkle, 21:12:56)
* <subbu> I propose we first address the question: why a spec, i.e.
what are the goals for writing a spec. (Krinkle, 21:15:13)
* <DanielK_WMDE> just an accepting grammar would be useless (Krinkle,
21:20:04)
* <brion> Are we specing Wikitext the character sequence <brion> Or
the document model? (Krinkle, 21:20:55)
* <subbu> let me reframe my goal: an executable spec for "old / legacy
wikitext" + clean wikitext processing model as a spec for wikitext
2.0. the former lets you deal with old content. (Krinkle, 21:22:41)
* <subbu> the latter lets you clean up wikitext and move forward.
(Krinkle, 21:22:48)
* <gwicke> many have made the case that that wikitext should be
treated as a textual UI & not as a storage format. <gwicke> I tend
to agree, it's not a good storage format (Krinkle, 21:23:43)
* <brion> in general HTML has too much low level detail: images list
several distinct URLs, you have lots of presentation markup, etc.
(Krinkle, 21:26:38)
* <SMalyshev> I think there are degrees of it. Even right now wikitext
on one wiki may be not reproducible on other wiki because of missing
modules/templates. (Krinkle, 21:28:14)
* <subbu> * is personally not interested in the grammar as a spec
direction (Krinkle, 21:29:50)
* LINK: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec/ANTLR/draft
(Krinkle, 21:30:21)
* <subbu> syntax spec is not useful for actually understanding
wikitext semantics or generaitng html from it. (Krinkle, 21:31:45)
* LINK:
https://github.com/wikimedia/parsoid/blob/master/lib/wt2html/pegTokenizer.pegjs.txt
(DanielK_WMDE, 21:32:00)
* LINK: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Markup_spec (DanielK_WMDE,
21:32:35)
* <TimStarling> spec for tokenization in the MW preprocessor:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Preprocessor_ABNF (Krinkle,
21:33:10)
* <subbu> so, for example, red links, etc. may not be essential in
the executable spec. (Krinkle, 21:41:31)
* <robla> the thing that's nice about a natural language version of a
spec (as opposed to an executable one) is that it's possible to have
an "incomplete" spec that's still useful (Krinkle, 21:41:57)
* Â <DanielK_WMDE>Â perhaps an improved PEG grammar as proposed by Tim
with lots of semi-formal comments would be a decent compromize
(robla, 21:47:06)
* <TimStarling> for purposes of archiving, I think HTML+CSS+images,
like kiwix, is good enough for most things (Krinkle, 21:48:04)
* <TimStarling>Â although storing wikitext is still essential, to keep
a record of user intentions with each edit (robla, 21:48:40)
* <gwicke> we already store Parsoid HTML for each edit <DanielK_WMDE>
gwicke: can we publish dumps of that? <gwicke> DanielK_WMDE: yes,
subject to some attention from ops (Krinkle, 21:51:11)
* the idea that stroing (and possibly publishing) parsoid HTML for
each revision for achieval seems to have some support
(DanielK_WMDE, 21:51:36)
* <subbu> now that we covered one part of the picture ... anyone have
thoughts on moving to a future wikitext spec with an improved
processing model? :) (Krinkle, 21:54:22)
* ACTION: subbu file a Phab task to track
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsing/Notes/A_Spec_For_Wikitext
for possible conversion to RFC (robla, 21:56:44)
* subbu to create RFC (Krinkle, 21:57:58)
* <gwicke> specs are hard (Krinkle, 21:58:24)
* <brion> Specs and models for everyooooooone (Krinkle, 21:58:36)
Meeting ended at 21:58:38 UTC.
People present (lines said)
---------------------------
* Krinkle (61)
* brion (59)
* subbu (56)
* gwicke (56)
* DanielK_WMDE (36)
* robla (35)
* TimStarling (27)
* Platonides (13)
* tgr (10)
* SMalyshev (10)
* James_F (5)
* Scott_WUaS (5)
* wm-labs-meetbot` (3)
* Debra (3)
* legoktm (3)
* arlolra (2)
Full log
---------
{P3815}
Other meetings
------------------
| **[Architecture meetings](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_meetings) ** |
|-----------------|
| 13:00 PT ArchCom Planning Meetings | [upcoming](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/calendar/query/DlzGwrbxMLu9/) | [all since 2016-03-30](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/calendar/query/M4fMy2PZOBQQ/) |
| **14:00 PT ArchCom-RFC Meetings** | **[upcoming](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/calendar/query/ShzbHT6BPGCE/)** | **[all since 2015-09-09](https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/calendar/query/XJjy54s3PEFf/)**