User:RobLa-WMF/Pandoc-20161018
Email I'm referencing in a comment to Phab:T146615. Please don't change the content on this page, but feel free to reformat for readability, and to use under the standard license of this site (or CC0 if you so choose).
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rob Lanphier <robla@wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 5:49 PM
Subject: Not enough Pandoc people registered for the Wikimedia Developer Summit
To: pandoc-discuss@googlegroups.com
Hi everyone,
There's an impending deadline (October 24) for upcoming Wikimedia
Developer Summit in San Francisco. Wikimedia Foundation is offering a
limited number of travel sponsorships for people almost anywhere in
the world who want to work with the Wikimedia development community.
What: The Wikimedia Developer Summit (WikiDev) is our annual meeting
to accelerate important conversations about the future of MediaWiki
and other technologies supporting the Wikimedia movement.
When: WikiDev17 will be held in San Francisco on January 9-11, 2017.
Who: All sorts of folks! Wikimedia technical contributors, third
party developers, people trying to convert to and from MediaWiki
markup (ahem!), you name it. We have [a really important mission][1],
and we need all of the help we can get! Please help us create and
improve with extensions, apps, tools, bots, gadgets, templates, and
other tech that helps us disseminate free educational content
effectively and globally.
[1]: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Mission_statement
Important imminent deadlines:
Monday, October 24: last day to request travel sponsorship.
Monday, October 31: last day to propose an activity.
Tuesday, November 1: first day I can realistically imagine us saying
"sorry, we've run out of room" :-)
someday shortly after that: we really do run out of room, and start
rejecting people who beg really really hard for an exception. We've
only got room for 200
An email quote from me you might find familiar:
> We would be delighted to be joined by knowledgeable members of the Pandoc
> community. I've been playing around with Pandoc (as a user) for the past
> few months, and I've been really happy with Pandoc as a tool. Many of
> extensions described in the [Pandoc's Markdown][1] section of your docs
> strike me as covering similar odd corner cases that the developers on the
> [Parsoid][2] component encounter. I say "similar", but of course, it may
> not be all that similar (I only have a management-level expertise). I think
> there's a lot we could learn from y'all, and I would love to figure out how
> our communities can collaborate.
[...]
> [1]: http://pandoc.org/README.html#pandocs-markdown
> [2]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid - This is the conversion
> utility important for MediaWiki's VisualEditor[3] component
> [3]: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor
(I wrote that back in June when I was talking about some Markdown
discussions we had in the Wikimedia development community. It still
applies)
Anyway, go here to see more:
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit>
(like, for example, a gorgeous CC-4.0 licensed photo of the venue at
the Presidio in San Francisco, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the
background)
Also, subscribe to be spammed mercilessly, every week!
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Td5wfd70vptn8eu4>
Please forward this note to any other relevant mailing lists, blog
comment sections, random fora, etc. Also, feel free to print this,
make hundreds of photocopies, and staple it to phone poles over the
top of yard sale announcements and junky advertisements. But please,
don't cover the photos of lost kittens (they're lost! their owners
miss them!)
I look forward to seeing *at least* one or two of you there! :-)
Rob
p.s. I'm robla on the #pandoc IRC channel. I won't copy the full
transcript (because copyright?), but I'll copy some of the things I
said on IRC yesterday. I take no real accountability for the crazy
things I say here, despite the fact I'm repeating them:
16:26:47 <robla> hi folks, I've long wanted to figure out how we could
work with y'all, and bring up Pandoc quite frequently when I talk
about MediaWiki's markup
16:27:10 <robla> (I'm from Wikimedia Foundation, and work on MediaWiki)
16:29:25 <robla> anyway, cutting the chase; I would _love_ to have
Pandoc developers/users/whatever at our next developer summit in
January 2017
16:34:59 <robla> I mailed [this list] back in June when I started the
(admittedly vague) conversation about MediaWiki needing a Markdown
strategy
16:35:08 <robla> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Markdown
16:36:41 <robla> in some respects, I was admittedly trolling our
community. Many people were off at Wikimania in Italy the week that I
sent that proposal out (and had a scheduled IRC conversation about it)
16:37:47 <robla> my main point in starting that conversation was "we
need to really start thinking about a better MediaWiki markup spec"
16:38:44 <robla> the more serious propsal:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/A_Spec_For_Wikitext
[...]
16:49:12 <robla> thank you all for Pandoc! I'm not yet anything other
than an avid user, but I'm tempted to finally learn Haskell so I can
start hacking it
[...]
17:06:37 <robla> one feature I'd love *someone* to implement is
two-way conversion between the WikiDOM format used by our VisualEditor
and the other formats supported by Pandoc
17:07:27 <robla> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/MediaWiki_DOM_spec
[...]
17:08:29 <robla> what that would mean: Pandoc could be an alternative
backend for MediaWiki's VisualEditor for standalone installs
17:09:09 <robla> ...and it would make it much easier to implement
visual editing support for any markup language Pandoc fully supports
17:09:35 <robla> if the world waits for me personally to do it, the
world may be waiting a while :-)