[Wikipedia-l] Re: wiki source cvs

[David Merrill]

On Mon, Jan 14, 2002 at 04:50:53PM +0100, Robert Bihlmeyer wrote:
> Larry Sanger <lsanger at nupedia.com> writes:
> 
> > This, by the way, would be a great feature for Wikipedia to be able to
> > use; we'd certainly like Wikipedia articles to be convertable to DocBook
> > XML format.  That's what we decided we wanted to use as an XML DTD for
> > Nupedia, and surely we'd want to use it for Wikipedia too.
> 
> I'm not convinced that DocBook is the best DTD for this kind of
> content. I like it very much for (computer-oriented) technical
> documentation, but for a more general topic? When used to its full
> extent DB is also quite baroque, and most of it probably wouldn't be
> used (for example the GUISUBMENU element <g>). Take a look at
> <URL:http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/part2.html> to get an overview
> of DocBook elements.
> 
> A simpler, encylopedia-specific DTD may be better. On the other hand,
> I don't know of any off-the-shelf DTD that fits this description, and
> a DocBook-subset may be better supported by other software than any
> DTD that's just used by Nupedia (and maybe Wikipedia).

I agree that any complete-ish implementation of DocBook would be very
hard and frought with difficulty. However, being about to export into
basic docbook (meaning not much more than links, sections, and <para>
tags) would allow the content to be worked into DocBook based
publication systems and such, and also the generation of pdf,
postscript, and other outputs. And *that* much at least would be
fairly easy and worth doing imho.

-- 
David C. Merrill                         http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david at lupercalia.net
Collection Editor & Coordinator            http://www.linuxdoc.org

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