Fredrik Johansson fredrik.johansson@gmail.com wrote:
Why not the intuitive /italicized text/ and *bold text*?
For any big change in syntax, there would be a cost to translate the various wikis to the new syntax, but that only happens once. Perhaps more importantly, there would be a significant cognitive change involved--people (and bots) would have to get used to the new syntax.
As for the specific characters you proposed, * at the begining of a line already means bullet; however, there is arguably a more accurate heuristic for this than the ones people are currently defending--basically, "does the rest of this paragraph contain an odd or even number of stars?" Italicized text is somewhat more difficult; sequences like foo/bar/baz aren't uncommon, and would be rendered unintelligible by a transformation to italics.
One thing worth looking at is Kwid, the markup language of Kwiki. In Kwid, the canonical forms of the inline formatting commands are {*bold*}, {/italics/}, {`code`} and so on, but when it's unambiguous (whitespace or punctuation before the leading character and after the trailing character), the curly brackets can be omitted: *bold*, /italics/, `code`. I don't really like a lot of things about Kwid, but this one might be worth stealing--*if* we're really contemplating a large syntax change.
I had a copy of Meta's cur table from 6 April 2005 lying around, so I loaded it into MySQL for a little analysis:
SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE NOT cur_is_redirect; -> 12782 SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP " \*[^\n]*\*[ \n]"; -> 289 SELECT COUNT(*) FROM cur WHERE cur_text REGEXP " /[^\n]*/[ \n]"; -> 291
So these sequences certainly aren't unheard of in wikitext, but they're not terribly common. (I'd love to see somebody run this against a few Wikipedias, btw--as I said, I only used Meta because that's what I had handy.)