Most of these are special purpose hacks. Kiwi and Sweble are the most serious projects I'm aware of, that have tried to generate a full parse.
However, few of these projects are useful for upgrading Wikipedia itself. Even the general parsers like Sweble are effectively special-purpose, since we have a lot of PHP that hooks into the parser and warps its behaviour in "interesting" ways. The average parser geek usually wants to write to a cleaner spec in, well, any language other than PHP. ;)
Currently the Wikimedia Foundation is just starting a MediaWiki.next project. Parsing is just one of the things we are going to change in major ways -- fixing this will make it much easier to do WYSIWYG editing or to publish content in ways that aren't just HTML pages.
(Obviously we will be looking at Sweble carefully.)
If this sounds like a fun project to you, please get in touch! Or check out the "Future" portal on MediaWiki.org.
FYI the JS parser is broken for some cases, but it works great for most things you want from message strings.
As for your original question, I don't think there is a forum that tries to unite the left-brained and right-brained wikipedians. There is a bit of a divide. I'll send an email right now to someone who might know better.
We don't have contests per se to try to steer the community, other than I guess GSoC, or reaching out to developers that we think are already doing good things.
Comments
This isn't the first alternative parser for MediaWiki content -- there are 28 rows in this table. (I just added Sweble's and my own project...)
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers#Known_impl...
Most of these are special purpose hacks. Kiwi and Sweble are the most serious projects I'm aware of, that have tried to generate a full parse.
However, few of these projects are useful for upgrading Wikipedia itself. Even the general parsers like Sweble are effectively special-purpose, since we have a lot of PHP that hooks into the parser and warps its behaviour in "interesting" ways. The average parser geek usually wants to write to a cleaner spec in, well, any language other than PHP. ;)
Currently the Wikimedia Foundation is just starting a MediaWiki.next project. Parsing is just one of the things we are going to change in major ways -- fixing this will make it much easier to do WYSIWYG editing or to publish content in ways that aren't just HTML pages.
(Obviously we will be looking at Sweble carefully.)
If this sounds like a fun project to you, please get in touch! Or check out the "Future" portal on MediaWiki.org.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future
Hey Neilk!
Did you ever turn up anything regarding this? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2216249
btw, neat js parser, i'll have to check it out. :)
FYI the JS parser is broken for some cases, but it works great for most things you want from message strings.
As for your original question, I don't think there is a forum that tries to unite the left-brained and right-brained wikipedians. There is a bit of a divide. I'll send an email right now to someone who might know better.
We don't have contests per se to try to steer the community, other than I guess GSoC, or reaching out to developers that we think are already doing good things.