Stephen Gilbert sgilbert@nbnet.nb.ca writes:
I don't think we want to force every contributor to learn SGML or XML. Our list of Wikipedians would shrink rather dramatically.
You cannot prove that claim. HTML is SGML and there are quite some HTML writers. Using SGML is easy. They can separate paragraphs by <p> and they are done. More advanced users can use more tags.
_Many_ editors isn't a good thing per se; we should rather go for _good_ editors.
He orginally wrote it to export wiki documents, but he found it also was much easier to write new documents in wiki syntax and convert them rather than starting with straight DocBook.
It isn't easier, but he is lazy ;) And he obviously enjoys using a cryptic markup language. Cf. my User page. Aditionally, you will never know whether wikipedia software accepts your HTML elements or not.
Lately we discussed fragment idetifiers and I was told they are supported; what must I write to make then work?
[[Garten#Geschichte]] does not seem to do the trick to point to something like <a name="Geschichte"> in the article "Garten".
If someone is seriously interested in uniformity, he should vote for SGML/XML; ignoring using a proper markup language is just a waste of human resources: without a DTD we are force to edit or adjust articles again and again.