On Sat, Dec 21, 2002 at 04:45:37PM -0600, Derek Moore did utter:
formatting capabilities in article submission to laypeople. A syntax similar to the variants used in wikies, but much more consistent, much more coherent, and
I couldn't agree more - I've always felt that wiki markup should resemble well organised (and maybe slightly quirky) .txt "nomarkup" formatting.
I started work on this because I'm doing a lot of development on a second generation community-developed/organized open publishing content management system for Independent Media Centers. The particular codebase I'm working on is going to be a sort of Wikipedia + scoop + multimedia galleries/archives + weblogs + newswire + Kronolith + etc.--all tightly rolled into one nice, easy-to-use, and consistent package.
I'll be VERY interested to see this... (and here we get to the bulk of my reply) ...since I've been having vague plans of creating (that would be frankencreating, to anyone who has seen my software creations) something along those lines you describe for the next generation of my own personal website. (which is currently a mixture of a home-made CMS hacked onto a pre-existing bloggish system (SIPS), gallery, and UseMod wiki).
As part of my plans for this, I've been designing my own "nomarkup" wiki-style markup for it's use. Currently I've only really got the basic wiki markup stuff done, and nothing for more advanced handling of CMS and multimedia handling. Nevertheless, I think we share similar goals.
So, I invite you to look over my markup ramblings on my own wiki: http://www.nut.house.cx/cgi-bin/nemwiki.pl?NEWS/TextFormatting
(this is a UseMod wiki btw, so it should be fairly familiar to wikipedia folks if anyone wants to edit in their own comments. :)
.../Nemo