User:RobLa-WMF/Pandoc-20161018

Email I'm referencing in a comment to 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 

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 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 (I'm from Wikimedia Foundation, and work on MediaWiki)

16:29:25 anyway, cutting the chase; I would _love_ to have

Pandoc developers/users/whatever at our next developer summit in

January 2017

16:34:59 I mailed [this list] back in June when I started the

(admittedly vague) conversation about MediaWiki needing a Markdown

strategy

16:35:08 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Markdown

16:36:41 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 my main point in starting that conversation was "we

need to really start thinking about a better MediaWiki markup spec"

16:38:44 the more serious propsal:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/A_Spec_For_Wikitext

[...]

16:49:12 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 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 https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid/MediaWiki_DOM_spec

[...]

17:08:29 what that would mean: Pandoc could be an alternative

backend for MediaWiki's VisualEditor for standalone installs

17:09:09 ...and it would make it much easier to implement

visual editing support for any markup language Pandoc fully supports

17:09:35 if the world waits for me personally to do it, the

world may be waiting a while  :-)