Parsing

The parsing team is, as the name indicates, responsible for maintaining the wikitext parsing products.

You can find us on IRC at or reach us on email on the parsing-team id on the wmf domain.

Mission Statement

 * (Input) Advance wikitext as a language (easier to write, faster to parse, less mistake prone).
 * (Output) Making wikitext content easier to analyze, manipulate, evolve to support tools like Visual Editor, Content Translation, Wikitext Linting, and others.
 * (Parsers) Arrive at a unified parser for reading as well as editing.

History
Prior to May 2015, the erstwhile mediawiki core team was responsible for the mediawiki core PHP parser and the Parsoid team was responsible for Parsoid. Since May 2015, the erstwhile Parsoid team was rebranded as the Parsing team and the core PHP parser and Parsoid were brought under the purview of the Parsing team - this coincided with Tim Starling joining the group.

Current projects

 * Parsoid:
 * Addressing needs of editing products deployed on the Wikimedia cluster (VisualEditor, Flow, Content Translation, bots) and non-editing projects (OCG, Google, Kiwix).
 * Making progress towards enabling read views with Parsoid HTML.
 * PHP core parser:
 * Replacing Tidy : Replacing Tidy with a HTML5 parser (which not only addresses longstanding Tidy complaints, but moves the core parser output closer to Parsoid)
 * Evolving wikitext
 * Various RFCs that seek to evolve wikitext which can help with the goal of addressing technical debt in content. A complete list is on Phabricator: RfCs tagged with "Parsing Team".  Some examples:
 * : Using the  tag for media markup
 * : Balanced templates
 * : Using  tags for sections
 * Testing infrastructure associated with these projects
 * Roundtrip testing for Parsoid deployment.
 * Visualdiff testing for evaluating changes to wikitext parsing, as well as evaluating rendering differences between the PHP parser and Parsoid
 * Parser tests
 * Other projects:
 * OCG: This continues to be owned by us (primarily C.Scott with Arlo's help) but would be better served with some other team since this is not a good fit for what our team does and we have very little resources to devote to this project.
 * Citoid:
 * As of Jan 2016, we acquired joint ownership of the Citoid project with the Services team and have been evaluating ways to break Citoid's dependency on xulrunner / Zotero (see T93579).
 * Using Parsoid as a wikitext linting tool (see T48705) -- this project is currently stalled and needs someone to pick up and take to completion.