On 28 December 2010 16:54, Stephanie Daugherty sdaugherty@gmail.com wrote:
Not only is the current markup a barrier to participation, it's a barrier to development. As I argued on Wikien-l, starting over with a markup that can be syntacticly validated, preferably one that is XML based would reap huge rewards in the safety and effectiveness of automated tools - authors of tools like AWB have just as much trouble making software handle the corner cases in wikitext markup as new editors have understanding it.
In every discussion so far, throwing out wikitext and replacing it with something that isn't a crawling horror has been considered a non-starter, given ten years and terabytes of legacy wikitext.
If you think you can swing throwing out wikitext and barring the actual code from human editing - XML is not safely human editable in any circumstances - then good luck to you, but I don't like your chances.
- d.