Can we deconstruct the current parser's processing steps and build a set of
rules that must be followed?

This stikes me as an area where the very few places where this kind of
strange mixed style nesting is rare enough we may even be able to introduce
a little bit of reform without much ill effect on the general body of
wikitext out there.

I think we need to get a dump of English Wikipedia and start using a simple
PEG parser to scan through it looking for patterns and figuring out how
often certain things are used - if ever.

Ward Cunninham had a setup that could do this sort of thing on a complete
en-wiki dump in like 10-15 minutes, and a fraction of the dump (still tens
of thousands of article in size) in under a minute. We supposedly have
access to him and his mad science laboratory - now would be a good time to
get that going.

- Trevor

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 8:00 AM, Gabriel Wicke <[email protected]> wrote:

> Sumana,
>
> the regular
>
> > ; bla : blub
>
> is actually not the issue. More problematic are for example:
>
>  ;; bla :: blub
>
>  *; bla : blub
>
> or even the simple
>
>  ;; bla
>
> Right now the behavior is quite inconsistent:
>  http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:GWicke/Definitionlists
>
> The bug discussing this is
>  https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6569
>
> Treating '; bla : blub' as a tightly-bound special-case construct seems
> to me the simplest way to make this area more consistent while avoiding
> very ugly syntax. This would mean that
>
>  *; bla : blub
>
> is treated as equivalent to
>  *; bla
>  *: blub
>
> and
>  ;; bla :: blub
>
> is equivalent to
>  ;; bla
>  ;: :blub
>
> What are your preferences on this? Is any of these cases commonly used
> today?
>
> Gabriel
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Wikitext-l mailing list
> [email protected]
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitext-l
>
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