6 ms·

And also that it says that WikiPedia articles are in an impenetrable, UNPARSABLE format that you can't run scripts against. This is absurd. If it's unparsable,

by burnte 6y ago

And also that it says that WikiPedia articles are in an impenetrable, UNPARSABLE format that you can't run scripts against. This is absurd. If it's unparsable, how does Mediawiki manage? because it IS parsable! oh my, in order to work with the content you need to either use the MW parser or write your own. Well, literally everything is like that. just because there aren't 5 different MW parser engines out there doesn't mean it's unparsable. I stopped reading the article early on.

detaro 6y ago
Mediawiki manages by having defined "whatever our code does is how it is", and when they needed a second parser for their new WYSIWG editor (because the one in the main Mediawiki code base isn't really usable for other purposes) it added a lot of extra effort and pain. So no, it's not literally "impossible", but a large hurdle to working with it. When I had to deal with mediawiki markup I built all kinds of really ugly tricks that fed markup snippets into a mediawiki instance, parsed the HTML, adjusted the snippets based on that, repeat...
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  POSIWID meet POMLIWIR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
  - jwilk 6y ago
    What's POMLIWIR?
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      The purpose of a markup language is what it renders.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
anoncake 6y ago
It's imparsable in a similar way to TeX and Perl: There is a program that can process it, good luck creating another.
- bawolff 6y ago
  There are two official parsers (original mw, and parsoid, with parsoid being much more of a "real" parser), so people did create another.
- sllabres 6y ago
  not a bad example nevertheless, but as we are talking about grammar https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perly.y https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perly.y
karmakaze 6y ago
If there's no grammar for the content that it accepts, I would consider this to be a failing, not fatal but certainly a good point being made.
- msla 6y ago
  The problem isn't a lack of grammar, the problem is not having a grammar factored out of one specific codebase which implements the grammar, such that you can't be sure the existing code is doing the right thing except from the trivial standpoint of "this code is defined to be correct" which doesn't provide much of a basis for discussion.
ChrisLomont 6y ago
You can have unparseable structures that are built upon using special, one time hacks for various cases and things you want out. "Parsing ... is the process of analyzing a string of symbols ... conforming to a formal grammar." [1] Wikipedia content is most definitely not a formal grammar in any usable meaning of the terms. This is why it's a nightmare to work with, and why it's not parseable using the correct meaning of parseable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing

by burnte 6y ago

detaro 6y ago

Mediawiki manages by having defined "whatever our code does is how it is", and when they needed a second parser for their new WYSIWG editor (because the one in the main Mediawiki code base isn't really usable for other purposes) it added a lot of extra effort and pain. So no, it's not literally "impossible", but a large hurdle to working with it. When I had to deal with mediawiki markup I built all kinds of really ugly tricks that fed markup snippets into a mediawiki instance, parsed the HTML, adjusted the snippets based on that, repeat...

dredmorbius 6y ago
POSIWID meet POMLIWIR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
- jwilk 6y ago
  What's POMLIWIR?
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    The purpose of a markup language is what it renders.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

anoncake 6y ago

It's imparsable in a similar way to TeX and Perl: There is a program that can process it, good luck creating another.

bawolff 6y ago
There are two official parsers (original mw, and parsoid, with parsoid being much more of a "real" parser), so people did create another.
sllabres 6y ago
not a bad example nevertheless, but as we are talking about grammar https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perly.y https://github.com/Perl/perl5/blob/blead/perly.y

karmakaze 6y ago

If there's no grammar for the content that it accepts, I would consider this to be a failing, not fatal but certainly a good point being made.

msla 6y ago
The problem isn't a lack of grammar, the problem is not having a grammar factored out of one specific codebase which implements the grammar, such that you can't be sure the existing code is doing the right thing except from the trivial standpoint of "this code is defined to be correct" which doesn't provide much of a basis for discussion.

ChrisLomont 6y ago

You can have unparseable structures that are built upon using special, one time hacks for various cases and things you want out. "Parsing ... is the process of analyzing a string of symbols ... conforming to a formal grammar." [1] Wikipedia content is most definitely not a formal grammar in any usable meaning of the terms. This is why it's a nightmare to work with, and why it's not parseable using the correct meaning of parseable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parsing