[Mediawiki-l] Cutting MediaWiki loose from wikitext

[Daniel Kinzler]

Hi all. I have a bold proposal (read: evil plan).

To put it briefly: I want to remove the assumption that MediaWiki pages contain
always wikitext. Instead, I propose a pluggable handler system for different
types of content, similar to what we have for file uploads. So, I propose to
associate a "content model" identifier with each page, and have handlers for
each model that provide serialization, rendering, an editor, etc.

The background is that the Wikidata project needs a way to store structured data
(JSON) on wiki pages instead of wikitext. Having a pluggable system would solve
that problem along with several others, like doing away with the special cases
for JS/CSS, the ability to maintain categories etc separate from body text,
manage Gadgets sanely on a wiki page, or several other things (see the link below).

I have described my plans in more detail on meta:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata/Notes/ContentHandler

A very rough prototype is in a dev branch here:

http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/branches/Wikidata/phase3/

Please let me know what you think (here on the list, preferably, not on the talk
page there, at least for now).

Note that we *definitely* need this ability for Wikidata. We could do it
differently, but I think this would be the cleanest solution, and would have a
lot of mid- and long term benefits, even if it's a short term pain. I'm
presenting my plan here to find out if I'm on the right track, and whether it is
feasible to put this on the road map for 1.20. It would be my (and the Wikidata
team's) priority to implement this and see it through before Wikimania. I'm
convinced we have the manpower to get it done.

Cheers,
Daniel

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[Jeremy Baron]

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 12:50, Maximilian Doerr <cyber...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I strongly disagree with removing wiki text.  Several thousand bots depend
> on it.  Especially Cluebot NG which is a highly sophisticated anti-vandalism
> bot.  I recommend going our current route where the visual editor writes the
> Wikimarkup realtime and vice versa.

I suspect maybe you didn't understand Daniel's message? (or didn't
read it?) I imagine most pages will still use the same markup we have
today after his idea is implemented.

For the pages that are different, the bots can and should adapt.

-Jeremy

[Daniel Kinzler]

On 27.03.2012 00:33, Tim Starling wrote:
> For the record: we've discussed this previously and I'm fine with it.
> It's a well thought-out proposal, and the only request I had was to
> ensure that the DB schema supports some similar projects that we have
> in the idea pile, like multiple parser versions.

Thanks Tim! The one important bit I'd like to hear from you is... do you think
it is feasible to get this not only implemented but also reviewed and deployed
by August?... We are on a tight schedule with Wikidata, and this functionality
is a major blocker.

I think implementing ContentHandlers for MediaWiki would have a lot of benefits
for the future, but if it's not feasible to get it in quickly, I have to think
of an alternative way to implement structured data storage.

Thanks