Wikimedia Developer Summit/2016/Content format

T119022 - This is the session pad for the Content format area session, slated to begin at 2pm on Monday, January 4.

Purpose
T119022 - Working area overview: how do we make manipulating our data easier and more useful? (both for humans and computers). What format should we use for the authoritative version of our essential content to make accessing and manipulating it easier and more useful (both for humans and computers)?

Agenda

 * 5-20 minutes - introductory comments
 * 60-75 minutes - open discussion

Etherpad
https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/WikiDev16-T119022

Goals
General discussion of our 2016 strategy for dealing with our central problem. This includes: The goal of this session will be to capture a document that can be the first wiki draft as a charter for this area.
 * Establishing the shared questions, challenges, vision
 * What we should head for? (e.g. move primary data out of SQL-based data stores into key-value stores? Should we use Cassandra and RESTbase as stable primary storage?)
 * What constitutes a "format"?
 * E.g.  if the data is stored in a MariaDB database, is the database itself is part of the format?
 * Are HTML-only wikis ever a viable solution (T112999)?
 * What about other formats (e.g. markdown, a refreshed wikitext 2.0?
 * JavaScript support for Scribunto?
 * Polyglot Wikimedia?
 * Fine-grained content tagging (e.g. Parsoid's stable IDs)
 * What is Wikimedia's essential content?
 * E.g. Articles, Revisions, Attribution, Categories, Associations/links (e.g. language links, interwiki links), Media (bitmaps, vector art, audio, video), Locations/coordinates

Chronology
''This section is where an attempt is made to capture the gist of who said what, in what order. A transcript isn't necessary, but it's useful to capture the important points made by speakers as they happen.''