[Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

[Austin Hair]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Dirk Riehle <dirk at riehle.org> wrote:
> Well, Brion probably knows what's coming, but what you are describing
> was attempted here:
>
> http://www.wikicreole.org
>
> A commonly agreed upon wiki syntax that is easy to use. Wiki Creole is
> actually mostly derived from Mediawiki Syntax.
>
> It is a success---many wiki engines use it. Brion was at the first
> workshop and expressed his support and interest, and we discussed many
> migration options. As far as I can tell nothing happened wrt to
> Mediawiki using WikiCreole---the reality of day-to-day work and the
> complexity of a heavy-duty wiki engine took its toll (my guess).
>
> If you are serious about reviving efforts for simplified or more
> formally defined wiki text (i.e. a specification not just an
> implementation) I suggest you talk to the Wiki Creole guys. You may
> also like my own work on an (EBNF) grammar for wiki text, see
> http://www.riehle.org/category/wiki-tech/

A uniform syntax across wikis is a good goal, but it really doesn't
address the issue talked about here.  The character sequence for
marking bold or italic text doesn't present an additional learning
curve; it's the meta-programming language we've introduced to allow
people to be really clever and make pretty boxes with obscure syntax
that poses a problem.  Or rather, it's that they need to take
advantage of it.

Metadata (the #1 use for templates) is something not addressed by the
MediaWiki software at all (save for categories and alternate
languages).  It's instead left for people to implement themselves in
an arbitrary, non-normalized way.  This hacked-in functionality
results in the unintuitive mess Delphine encountered.

A WYSIWYG interface isn't an answer by itself, but normalizing
metadata and providing an interface for it can be.  I don't outline a
comprehensive solution, and I know it's been talked about many times
before, but I do think that we shouldn't be afraid to implement
Wikipedia-specific functionality in MediaWiki.  (And similar for any
other projects; all I'm saying is that it doesn't need to be a generic
pseudo-solution.  MediaWiki is our software, first and foremost.)

Austin