Well, its just an idea. I'm not going to bet my house on its acceptance. But, here are some thoughts why it might work.
Mediawiki powers an awful lot of wikis, some used by businesses that cannot afford instability in its operation. It is in their interest to ensure it remains maintainable. So, they might be willing to provide some funding. In addition I'm sure Mediawiki is used by some parts of the government (both US and other countries), so there might be some funding available through those channels. As to whether it is an interesting challenge, I agree writing a new parser in and of itself isn't. But, reengineering a heavily used software product that has to keep working during the process is a significant software reengineering headache. I once worked on a system that attempted to do that and we failed. It took us 10 years to transition (we actually got it into production for while) and by that time everything had changed. They ultimately through it away. The grand challenge is to do "rapid" software reengineering. In regards to the 2%, you could stipulate that the solution must provide tools to automatically convert the 2% (or the vast majority of them). Anyway, its only an idea. I think the biggest impediment is it requires someone with both a commitment to it and significant juice to spearhead it. That is probably why it wouldn't work. --- On Tue, 7/14/09, Aryeh Gregor <[email protected]> wrote: > From: Aryeh Gregor <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Is this the right list to ask questions about > parserTests > I suspect nobody's going to stand a chance without > funding. > > $ cat includes/parser/*.php | wc -l > 11064 > > That's not the kind of thing most people write for an > interesting challenge. > > Also, you realize that 2% of pages would mean 350,000 pages > on the > English Wikipedia alone? Probably a million pages > across all > Wikimedia wikis? And who knows how many if you > include third-party > wikis? > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
