[Wikipedia-l] About creating a new language on Wikipedia

[Andrew Gray]

On 19/07/07, Berto 'd Sera <albertoserra at ukr.net> wrote:
> Hoi,
>
> Not an easy answer. In piedmonetese we first made a small sequence of
> explanations about how to structure text and add images. It helps if you
> step out of geek terms and use the terminology coming from the handcraft of
> your culture (something about decoration of objects and related tools), so
> people get the message quick. At that point you can have people write plain
> text and add images, while admins volunteer to study the markup more in
> depth and start to produce small user guides. It takes patience and care for
> people's reactions.

Mediawiki markup is - by the standards of markup languages - really
quite simple; [[-]] for links, ''-'' for emphasis. Everything else you
can label "advanced stuff" and not worry about to start with! Check
the keyboard does have those characters, mind you... but once you
figure out how to get the idea across, the very basics of the language
are simple.

(Perhaps a good second stage is headers == and [[Image:...]]; a third
stage might be fancier formatting, :: and *. After that you're into
stuff which is beyond simple "markup", you're dealing with
templates...)

It might be worth seeing if there are any "really really basic guides
on using HTML" that you can find - that's the most likely markup
language to have simple guides written for it, and you may be able to
adapt the remarks in there.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk