On 2/14/07, Chuck Smith chuckssmith@gmail.com wrote:
Another benefit of changing the double single quotes and triple single quotes to // and ** respectively is that it would be a small step to making MediaWiki markup more Creole-compatible (www.wikicreole.org). Also, it seems like a conversion script for just these two elements would not be that difficult to write. What could be potential complications?
In terms of the pure syntax?
1) C++-style comments use //. 2) URLs use // (and probably not all will be linked). 3) Lists use **. 4) ** is often used for footnote-style things, once * has been used (although this usage may not be common on WMF projects). 5) Probably there are some weird languages out there that use these somehow.
All of those are, however, fairly easily surmountable with a well-designed initial pass to clean them up (nowikiing where needed, adding spaces after line-initial ** outside of nowiki/pre, flagging URL-y things to be looked at), at least in theory. The basic problem is, as Christopher says, getting users who are used to '''? to start using (**|//). It would be frustrating, and we'd get invalid markup being put into articles regularly for months. And what would the benefit be? Putting a Band-Aid on a missing limb of parseability? Compatibility with wikisyntax that we definitely don't need and that none of our import sources use? Not worth it, not by a long shot.