I have a couple of general wiki questions, and thought I would ask here since several of you have pretty good wiki experience.
How standard is the wikipedia text format?
Is there a standard name for that type of format? I am calling it WikiText, but I'd rather use the usual term, if there is one. My conversion utility is called txt2db, but I realized that is a bad name. It's not for any text file, but for a specific format. So I want toknow how I should properly refer to it.
btw, I will have a demo of some Wikipedia articles on my LDP mirror soon, and after that passes LDP staff inspection, it will go live on the LDP site! Woo Hoo! That should get Wikipedia some good publicity, and it will sure help the LDP as well. Thanks again to all of you for your wonderful spirit of cooperation.
David Merrill wrote:
Is there a standard name for that type of format? I am calling it WikiText, but I'd rather use the usual term, if there is one.
CamelCase is what people call it when you smash words together.
I think that this format:
[[Wiki Text]] is our own invention (Larry? Clifford Adams? me? someone else? doesn't matter I guess...), or at least I think so.
I know that in an earlier version of UseMod Wiki, CamelCase was all that worked, but people thought it looked too silly for an encylopedia, so Clifford coded up the [[]] system for us.
--Jimbo
On Sun, Jan 27, 2002 at 08:14:40PM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
David Merrill wrote:
Is there a standard name for that type of format? I am calling it WikiText, but I'd rather use the usual term, if there is one.
CamelCase is what people call it when you smash words together.
I think that this format:
[[Wiki Text]] is our own invention (Larry? Clifford Adams? me? someone else? doesn't matter I guess...), or at least I think so.
I know that in an earlier version of UseMod Wiki, CamelCase was all that worked, but people thought it looked too silly for an encylopedia, so Clifford coded up the [[]] system for us.
I see. Well that isn't very helpful for me, but I think that's because there really isn't an answer.
I'm talking about not just the way a link is done, but also the * for bullets, # for numbering, ---- for rules, = for sections, etc. All of those are what I'm using.
Maybe if there isn't any regularly used term, I'll just make something up, play marketroid. :-)
You should ask Ward Cunningham and Clifford Adams. I think Clifford was trying (mostly) to make a perl clone of c2 wiki, and I think many or most of those were originally on c2.
But I don't think there's a single standard or name for it.
At Wikipedia, if I go through an article and add wiki markup, we call it 'wikifying' as in: "I wikified a few words in this article."
But that's just our own slang, I guess.
David Merrill wrote:
On Sun, Jan 27, 2002 at 08:14:40PM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
David Merrill wrote:
Is there a standard name for that type of format? I am calling it WikiText, but I'd rather use the usual term, if there is one.
CamelCase is what people call it when you smash words together.
I think that this format:
[[Wiki Text]] is our own invention (Larry? Clifford Adams? me? someone else? doesn't matter I guess...), or at least I think so.
I know that in an earlier version of UseMod Wiki, CamelCase was all that worked, but people thought it looked too silly for an encylopedia, so Clifford coded up the [[]] system for us.
I see. Well that isn't very helpful for me, but I think that's because there really isn't an answer.
I'm talking about not just the way a link is done, but also the * for bullets, # for numbering, ---- for rules, = for sections, etc. All of those are what I'm using.
Maybe if there isn't any regularly used term, I'll just make something up, play marketroid. :-)
-- David C. Merrill http://www.lupercalia.net Linux Documentation Project david@lupercalia.net Collection Editor & Coordinator http://www.linuxdoc.org
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Jimmy wrote:
At Wikipedia, if I go through an article and add wiki markup, we call it 'wikifying' as in: "I wikified a few words in this article."
What is the history of using multiple single quotes for ''italics'' and '''boldface'''? The old e-mail and Usenet news convention is to use _italics_ and *boldface*. Has that text format ever been named and documented?
The old e-mail and Usenet news convention is to use _italics_ and *boldface*.
Dolphin WikiWeb uses those conventions: http://www.object-arts.com/wiki/html/Dolphin/WikiTextFormattingRules.htm
I can't find the reference that explains his rationale, but I seem to recall that Ward created ''italic'' and '''bold''' because those markups were easily distinguishable and trivial to type. Both _ and * require the use of the shift key, and that didn't meet with his objective to make content creation as easy as possible. Of course, that doesn't explain why he settled on CamelCase, but I think it's safe to say that CamelCase betrays the influence of his object-oriented coding background. (CamelCase is more popular than underscores_in_variables among OO types.) I, for one, am extremely grateful to Cliff Adams for inventing the [[free link]] convention. Easy to distinguish from plain text, easy to type, and it's more aesthetically pleasing and flexible.
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Tim Chambers wrote:
The old e-mail and Usenet news convention is to use _italics_ and *boldface*.
I personally don't use '' and ''' because I can never remember which is which. I use <i> and <b>, which come from html, and strike me as more intuitive for the newcomer.
But wikipedia supports both, of course.
objective to make content creation as easy as possible. Of course, that doesn't explain why he settled on CamelCase,
Well, I think CamelCase is consistent with making content creation as easy as possible. It's "transparent" as it looks the same in editing and in the output. It looks _silly_ in the output, which is why we are no longer using it at Wikipedia, but it certainly makes it easy for newcomers to get started.
But [[]] are also super-easy, of course.
--Jimbo
On Monday 28 January 2002 19:56, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Well, I think CamelCase is consistent with making content creation as easy as possible. It's "transparent" as it looks the same in editing and in the output. It looks _silly_ in the output, which is why we are no longer using it at Wikipedia, but it certainly makes it easy for newcomers to get started.
Until you start writing about Scotland. You know, McTavish, MacDonald, FitzGerald ... <g>
Good riddance, I say
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