On Thu, 6 Jul 2017 at 08:01 Pine W <wiki.p...@gmail.com> wrote: > I understand that moving from HTML 4 to HTML 5 is probably a good idea. > > However, I am concerned about this statement: "This will require editors > to fix pages and templates to address wikitext patterns that behave > differently with RemexHTML". > > As you probably know, the supply of content contributors' time is far too > low to meet the demands of keeping up with everything that ideally would > be done on the content projects. >
The interpretation of wikitext changes from time to time, and have done ever since we started inventing it. New features get added, old features get removed, and existing ones get altered. Consequently, lines of wikitext that previously did one thing will then do another, which may or may not be desired. When these kinds of change happen, there's normally a brief notice in Tech/News with a few weeks' warning, and often a few community members do a quick scan for issues. Sometimes the effects of the change can be fixed with a bot on some wikis, which is hampered by the lack of a cluster-wide bot policy; the one called the "global bot policy" on Meta doesn't allow technical fixes like this, and even if it did, it doesn't apply to all Wikimedia wikis. Some changes aren't automatically fixable, however; they instead require a human editor, ideally from that community, to judge what effect was intended, and how to correct it, rather than a simple substitution. This set of changes is no different, except that we're being particularly cautious in alerting communities to those changes, taking our time to make sure this goes well, and providing a suite of tools to identify and fix these occurrences (which will be useful for future changes). [Snip] > Here are a few questions: > 1. How many fixes do you think will be needed, for the highest priority > fixes as well as all fixes? > In the document linked from the e-mail to which you replying, it stated that communities will need to fix the three "High" priority tasks on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:LintErrors and the equivalent for each wiki. > 2. How many hours of volunteer time do you think that these fixes will > require, > for the highest priority fixes as well as all fixes? > It will vary by wiki, especially regarding the point below. For MW.org it took maybe a few hours, spread over a half dozen individuals. > 3. How feasible would it be to build bots to make 90% of high priority > fixes and > 90% of all fixes? > That's a question for each community. In this case, the majority of complex fixes will need to be made to templates, rather than directly in-text, and I'm sure that semi-automated fixes will be appropriate for some communities, but others will feel that they need to be made manually. J. -- James D. Forrester Lead Product Manager, Editing Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. jforrester at wikimedia.org <https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l> | @jdforrester _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
