On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:43 PM, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 28 December 2010 16:54, Stephanie Daugherty
<sdaugherty(a)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.
That is true - "We can't do away with Wikitext" always been the
intermediate conclusion (in between "My god, we need to do something
about this problem" and "This is hopeless, we give up again").
Perhaps it's time to start some exercises in noneuclidian Wiki
development, and just assume the opposite and see what happens.
--
-george william herbert
george.herbert(a)gmail.com