C. Scott Ananian
C. Scott Ananian is an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, working on the Parsoid project. He also dabbles with LanguageConverter, and Real-time collaboration in VE.
Previously, Dr. Ananian was a jack-of-all-trades for the One Laptop per Child Foundation. He received his PhD in computer science from MIT, and before joining OLPC was a local activist and organizer for copyright issues. He's a kernel hacker, part-time khipu researcher, and aperiodic tesselation aficionado. Now he tries to build robust and reliable systems to allow everyone to discover, share, and learn.
Sessions
Let's talk about wikitext, the markup language authors and editors use to express not just words for humans to read, but all sorts of information about the structure, processes, sources, taxonomy, organization and reliability of our work. What would you like to express, but find difficult? What would you change if you could? What rough edges and unexpected behaviors trip you up?
In this open discussion I will kick things off with a dozen different visions for wikitext, including syntax changes minor and major, new templating mechanisms, replacing wikitext entirely with markdown, not writing wikitext at all ever, annotations everywhere, and a language for page layout. Then you’ll contribute your own ideas and we’ll discuss together the pros and cons. At the end hopefully we’ll find a few pieces of gold among the pile of wild ideas!
Parsoid is coming to your wiki soon!
MediaWiki currently uses two different components to convert wiki markup into HTML for readers: a legacy parser and, since 2011, Parsoid. Parsoid is already used for VisualEditor and for reading Wikivoyage and some Wiktionaries. In this talk, we’ll present the Parser Unification project which aims to use Parsoid for all of Wikimedia’s readers. We’ll highlight the new features Parsoid enables and explain our rollout plan and testing strategy. We’ll also show how you can opt-in early to help try out Parsoid, address your questions, and offer a roadmap for one of MediaWiki’s largest platform changes in recent years.
What's the future of Scribunto? It's the primary scripting/template system of the Wikimedia projects, but it has effectively been maintenance-only for over a decade and it's still running Lua 5.1, which has been end-of-life since 2012.
So let's imagine a more exciting future for Scribunto!
Scribunto running JavaScript! Scribunto in French! Scribunto in every language at once! Scribunto with a modern separation of presentation and data! Scribunto with a HTML DOM library or an SVG library! Scribunto and Charts! Scribunto integration with Visual Editor! Maybe even... Scribunto running on a modern supported Lua release! (Sigh.)
Join me for some (perhaps) provocative musings on all these topics, using prototypes and designs of the author, including code you can run on Wikimedia wikis today.