[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wikis and uniformity

[Jimmy Wales]

sgilbert at nbnet.nb.ca wrote:
> I believe Nupedia (Wikipedia's parent encyclopedia project) used 
> XML markup. That project had a division of labour between writers 
> and editors: the former simply wrote the articles, while the latter did 
> all the fancy markup.

And it worked well enough to generate 12 articles in 18 months, at an
exorbitant cost to me.  :-(

I'm not saying that XML is bad, though.  I *am* saying, since I've
been silent throughout this entire discussion, that I tend to side
with those who disfavor adding to or changing our markup much, despite
the fact that it isn't very powerful.

I'm very enamoured of the idea of meta-content markup.  Marking up
<date></date> or <person></person> and so on, wow, there are a lot of
cool possibilities.

But we should be reluctant to tamper much with a system that totally
works in an amazing way.

--Jimbo