Jimbo> I don't know anything about how formal standards are > proposed and decided, but just as with HTML, it seems that > wiki syntax is a natural for some standardization.
I do know something of the process, having participated in it for PNG, and have done some work toward a cleaner wiki syntax already. The hardest part, as already mentioned, is that there is a pretty large installed base of other wikis and lots of divergent opinions on what's good and bad about each of them. Yes, prehaps our position as the largest one gives us some leverage.
Magnus> There's another way: > * Agree on a XML standard for wikis > * Each wiki system writes a wiki-to-XML and XML-to-wiki function
Well, for "XML standard" substitute "Semantic model" and you've got a good start. Once you have the model, then you can express it in XML to allow data-sharing, but we'd still want to work toward standardising the user experience.
AsciiDoc http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/ impresses me as a step in the right direction, but the model needs to be expanded to include a few wiki-specific things.