Well, if so, it might have been a good idea to involve
more of the
people who are actually active in Wikipedia's math area. Right now,
Toby and I have both stated that we are not too fond of the texvc
approach.
I can understand that - after all, you are familiar with TeX and you want
to use its maximum power. But from a Wikipedia-wide perspective, we have
to keep other factors in mind.
No, people should definitely be able to create math
formulas, chess
diagrams, chemical structure diagrams, music scores and flow charts in
LaTeX, because that's the wiki way: these graphics can then be modified
by directly editing the source code
I know LaTeX and I use it for all my written correspondence. That means
that I also know how unreadable it can get, even if you have the 500 page
Kopka introduction or something similar near your desk. It's possible to
do great things with LaTeX, but then, why not have a Python backend with
some drawing library, or maybe a POV-Ray backend as well ..
Instead of arbitrarily providing such functionality, we should, for all
different types of problems, think carefully what the best tool for the
job is. In Maths, TeX/LaTeX is very popular, so it may well be the best
tool for the job here. But for music, maybe the recently mentioned GNU
Lilypond would be better and easier to learn/use? Basic diagrams might be
best handled in SVG or something like that, for plots a gnuplot backend
might be nice. And so forth, and so on. Aside from the usability
advantage, you also get the geek factor of being able to play with many
different toys.
If we do not do this, we force people who want to participate in the wiki
process to learn tools that may be suboptimal, even though there may be
better and more popular tools for that specific job. From a usability
perspective, that's a bad idea. By limiting initially the scope of TeX
use, we avoid this usability trap. If it turns out that the music people
prefer TeX to Lilypond, we'll send some hired goons to Tomasz and persuade
him to include support for the necessary markup in texvc ;-). etc.
Image layout and table support is currently available
on Wikipedia with
HTML syntax
Yes, but this is suboptimal because only a relatively small subset of
Wikipedia users knows HTML, and for those who don't, the HTML syntax is
unnecessarily complex. (We also get lots of different table styles because
some HTML wizards love to experiment.) That's why we use the wiki syntax
instead of HTMl all over the place. But tables are tricky, therefore we
haven't implemented them yet (some good proposals exist).
Regards,
Erik