Submissions/Wikitext: upcoming changes, available tools, what you can do.

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2017.

This is an Open submission for Wikimania 2017 that has not yet been reviewed by a member of the Programme Committee.

Submission no. 3074 - T1, T3

Title of the submission: Wikitext: upcoming changes, available tools, what we need help with.

Type of submission: Lecture

Author of the submission: Subramanya Sastry, James D. Forrester

Language of presentation: English

E-mail address: ssastrywikimedia.org

Username: SSastry (WMF)

Country of origin: India / USA

Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.): Parsing Team, Wikimedia Foundation

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (up to 300 words to describe your proposal)

On the Parsing team at the Wikimedia Foundation, we have been working to improve wikitext so it's simpler, faster, easier to edit, and retains its powerful abilities. We have a number of projects, including cleaning up some corner cases in wikitext parsing, addressing long standing bugs, better integrating HTML5 semantics, identifying and deprecating wikitext, providing new syntax for multi-template blocks, improving templating behavior, and so on. Long-term, by making lots of incremental changes, we hope to nudge wikitext towards improved semantics that will improve performance as well as provide better editing tools for you.

In some of the changes we're needing to make, we end up having to break existing wikitext. This means that editors will need to fix up articles and/or templates to preserve existing rendering – or decide that the new rendering is what was wanted in the first place. In this talk, we are going to listen to feedback from you on how we should proceed, highlighting the following:

changes we have made and changes that we are considering;
what motivates some of the changes we are making;
how we identify what pages / templates might break, discussing the visual diffing QA framework that we use;
how we ensure our changes have minimal breakages; and
what tools and support we provide editors to fix up pages and templates, including the Linter and ParserMigration extensions.

By the time Wikimania comes around, the help page about Linter and related pages will document this more deeply.

What will attendees take away from this session?: Attendees will hear about Parsing team's projects that might affect wikitext and provide feedback, know what kind of wikitext fixups are / might be necessary, and find out about tools available to identify these fix-ups, and verify their correctness.

Theme of presentation: Technology, Interface & Infrastructure

For workshops and discussions, what level is the intended audience?: N/A

Length of session (if other than 25 minutes, specify how long): 45 minutes ideally; If only 25 mins available, will accordingly sharpen the focus.

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

Session notes

Slides

Special requests

Is this Submission a Draft or Final?

This is a Completed submission for Wikimania 2017 ready to be reviewed by a member of the Programme Committee.

Interested attendees

If you are interested in attending this session, please sign with your username below. This will help reviewers to decide which sessions are of high interest. Sign with a hash and four tildes. (# ~~~~).

Amir É. Aharoni (talk) 10:17, 9 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Jdforrester (WMF) (talk) 19:58, 10 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
--Cirdan (talk) 19:53, 12 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]
GDubuc (WMF) (talk) 20:30, 1 May 2017 (UTC)[reply]
--Elitre (WMF) (talk) 13:26, 23 June 2017 (UTC)[reply]
--Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 13:38, 30 July 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Effeietsanders (talk) 10:04, 1 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Tenbergen (talk) 23:14, 10 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Rhythm (talk) 15:27, 11 August 2017 (UTC)[reply]