Magnus Manske wrote:
- We change our wiki syntax, however slightly. Besides everyone
using MediaWiki having to learn a new (altered) syntax, we'll have to change *every* page in our databases, including *all* old
What experience do we have from leaving CamelCase markup in 2001? Was there a transition periond when the parser warn against CamelCase? Were all old revisions changed? (Or just mercifully deleted?)
If we are into refactoring the wiki syntax, one thing that might need some rethinking is right-to-left writing systems (Hebrew, Arabic) and how they blend with [[wiki tags]] and <xml or html markup>. This was hardly an issue in 2001, and after this there have been no fundamental changes in Wikipedia's syntax. I don't read Hebrew or Arabic, but trying to read the wiki code on Wikipedia in these languages is more confusing than just the foreign languages.
On he.wikipedia, it seems that [[image: picture.jpg | some text]] is [[txet emos | picture.jpg :egami]], where everything is neatly right-to-left except the filename. But the occasional HTML/XML markup is <tag attribute="value"> in that (left-to-right) order.
Perhaps HTML/XML style markup should be banned from the wiki text before we standardize? We could introduce [[:br]] for <br> etc.