WikiTexVC: MediaWiki's native LaTeX to MathML converter for Wikipedia
Johannes Stegm\"uller, Moritz Schubotz

TL;DR
WikiTexVC is a new integrated MediaWiki tool that converts LaTeX formulas to MathML, improving robustness, performance, and accessibility, and supporting semantic annotations for mathematical content.
Contribution
It introduces WikiTexVC, a novel MediaWiki-integrated method for validating LaTeX formulas and converting them directly to MathML, enhancing existing rendering approaches.
Findings
Validated with over 300,000 formulas in automated tests.
Compared parse trees with other MathML renderers using tree edit distance.
Implemented a macro for formula disambiguation to improve accessibility.
Abstract
MediaWiki and Wikipedia authors usually use LaTeX to define mathematical formulas in the wiki text markup. In the Wikimedia ecosystem, these formulas were processed by a long cascade of web services and finally delivered to users' browsers in rendered form for visually readable representation as SVG. With the latest developments of supporting MathML Core in Chromium-based browsers, MathML continues its path to be a de facto standard markup language for mathematical notation in the web. Conveying formulas in MathML enables semantic annotation and machine readability for extended interpretation of mathematical content, in example for accessibility technologies. With this work, we present WikiTexVC, a novel method for validating LaTeX formulas from wiki texts and converting them to MathML, which is directly integrated into MediaWiki. This mitigates the shortcomings of previously used…
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Taxonomy
TopicsMathematics, Computing, and Information Processing · Open Education and E-Learning · Digital Humanities and Scholarship
