I wonder if we shouldn't contact the developers of other open source wiki software, and convene a by-email "mini summit meeting" about wiki syntax, and try to formalize a standard that they and we can all follow.
We've deviated, with good cause and good results, from the traditional CamelCase method, but there's a lot of syntax that wikis share, but lots of little idiosyncracies that should probably be ironed out.
Or, we could just create our own standard, publish it, and recommend that everyone else follow it. Maybe a bad idea, though.
--Jimbo
(Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com):
Or, we could just create our own standard, publish it, and recommend that everyone else follow it. Maybe a bad idea, though.
That's always my favorite approach. There's no better way to win an argument about software design than "Look, this works, now."
I wonder if we shouldn't contact the developers of other open source wiki software, and convene a by-email "mini summit meeting" about wiki syntax, and try to formalize a standard that they and we can all follow.
There have, as always, been several attempts to standardize on some common syntax. In the Python world, reStructured text seems to be quite popular:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-matters24/
One of us has proposed a standardized Wiki-syntax ("Wikitax"):
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikitax
And I bet there are many other wikis out there who are thinking about the problem.
However, please keep in mind that we have hundreds of megabytes of existing wikitext, and converting this to anything else would be a major PITA. It may be doable but is probably nothing the developers want to spend much time on.
On the other hand, UseMod-style wikitext is very common. Wikipedia is by far the largest wiki and will remain so, probably forever. The best approach may be to fix the problems in our current parser and syntax, and then document that as much as possible and publish it under some name. Before we do that, we should definitely add basic support for tables, though. And \ for single linebreaks (instead of <br>) might be nice, too.
Regards,
Erik
(Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de):
However, please keep in mind that we have hundreds of megabytes of existing wikitext, and converting this to anything else would be a major PITA. It may be doable but is probably nothing the developers want to spend much time on.
I consider that a minor issue. Ours is the largest wiki on the planet, and converting every page in the database would take a few hours at most, and I consider that a small price for the potential gains of a clean, usable syntax.
I think somewhere on meta someone suggested including tables in the same way that we include images. I think this is quite a good idea as some articles with tables in look like a complete mess in edit windows, just having [[table:some table]] or something might make them look a little cleaner. I just thought I should re-mention this while there was discussion of syntax. I don't know the ins and outs of designing this kind of thing so maybe there's many a good reason for not doing this but I just thought I should mention it.
Cheers,
Andrew (Ams80) ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lee Daniel Crocker" lee@piclab.com To: wikitech-l@wikipedia.org Sent: Thursday, May 08, 2003 10:31 PM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Wiki syntax
(Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de):
However, please keep in mind that we have hundreds of megabytes of existing wikitext, and converting this to anything else would be a major PITA. It may be doable but is probably nothing the developers want to spend much time on.
I consider that a minor issue. Ours is the largest wiki on the planet, and converting every page in the database would take a few hours at most, and I consider that a small price for the potential gains of a clean, usable syntax.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker lee@piclab.com http://www.piclab.com/lee/ "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
(Andrew Smith ams80@cam.ac.uk): I think somewhere on meta someone suggested including tables in the same way that we include images. I think this is quite a good idea as some articles with tables in look like a complete mess in edit windows, just having [[table:some table]] or something might make them look a little cleaner. I just thought I should re-mention this while there was discussion of syntax. I don't know the ins and outs of designing this kind of thing so maybe there's many a good reason for not doing this but I just thought I should mention it.
That was certainly one way to do it, but unless we have a new syntax, that just moves the difficultly around without solving it. Sure, it makes the enclosing page simpler, but you still need to code the table itself, and if newbies can't do that, they can't really participate any more than they do now with complex tables that just get left alone.
I think a simplification of MoinMoin syntax will do us just fine:
||| Table | col1 | col2 | col2
Gets rendered as a table with two rows, the first having a single cell spanning three columns, and the second having three cells.
We can eliminate the MoinMoin syntax for centering and justifying cells because that can be done more simply with the unified style syntax. I don't see any reason to need rowspans--I can live without them. We might want to do something to distinguish table heading cells from regular data cells; I'm thinking using the "=" symbol so that it's consistent with text headings.
On Thu, 8 May 2003, Jimmy Wales wrote:
I wonder if we shouldn't contact the developers of other open source wiki software, and convene a by-email "mini summit meeting" about wiki syntax, and try to formalize a standard that they and we can all follow.
We've deviated, with good cause and good results, from the traditional CamelCase method, but there's a lot of syntax that wikis share, but lots of little idiosyncracies that should probably be ironed out.
The problem is, that when there would be a standard, those that have something different would have to change. Few will have a problem with adding some extra Wiki-syntax (like the \ for a linebreak someone else proposed in this thread), but when existing syntax has to be deprecated, it means that lots of pages have to be changed, possibly causing errors, users suddenly have to change their habits, etcetera. I think that many developers will have an "If it isn't broke, don't fix it" attitude to that.
To give an example of the 'little idiosyncracies' Jimmy is talking about: In Wikipedia, one links to another title than the text of the link with [[link|title]]. In Sensei's Library (the only other Wiki of this kind that I frequent) it is [title|link]. Very similar, using the same ideas, and yet totally non-compliant with each other.
Andre Engels
To give an example of the 'little idiosyncracies' Jimmy is talking about: In Wikipedia, one links to another title than the text of the link with [[link|title]]. In Sensei's Library (the only other Wiki of this kind that I frequent) it is [title|link]. Very similar, using the same ideas, and yet totally non-compliant with each other.
Well, I wonder then how one creates an external link on Sensei's Library. If we can get the energy up and get others to participate movement toward a standard seems worthwhile. Its been done with html and electric plugs.
Fred
On Fri, 9 May 2003, Fred Bauder wrote:
To give an example of the 'little idiosyncracies' Jimmy is talking about: In Wikipedia, one links to another title than the text of the link with [[link|title]]. In Sensei's Library (the only other Wiki of this kind that I frequent) it is [title|link]. Very similar, using the same ideas, and yet totally non-compliant with each other.
Well, I wonder then how one creates an external link on Sensei's Library.
In the same way - the software recognizes when the second half is a URL, just like our software recognizes a URL when it's part of the text.
Andre Engels
To give an example of the 'little idiosyncracies' Jimmy is talking about: In Wikipedia, one links to another title than the text of the link with [[link|title]]. In Sensei's Library (the only other Wiki of this kind that I frequent) it is [title|link]. Very similar, using the same ideas, and yet totally non-compliant with each other.
Well, I wonder then how one creates an external link on Sensei's Library. If we can get the energy up and get others to participate movement toward a standard seems worthwhile. Its been done with html and electric plugs.
Fred
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