At ETech in San Francisco, I met with Ross Mayfield of Socialtext, and
we discussed the idea that there should be a central core set of
standard wiki syntax. Ross was quite keen on the concept.
Standard syntax is important for the entire wiki world so that as
people become more accustomed to using wikis for all kinds of things,
they can feel comfortable on a variety of platforms.
It seems natural to me that as the largest wiki project (and we are
probably the wiki engine with the most installations, although I have
no actual way of knowing that), we should take a leadership role in
this.
http://www.socialtext.net/mayfield/index.cgi?action=refcard&login=user4…
is a quick 'refcard' on the syntax of socialtext.
I propose that we set up a group of people either in a mailing list or
a wiki or both, and invite representatives from all the major wiki
software projects and companies to participate in a syntax standard.
I don't know anything about how formal standards are proposed and
decided, but just as with HTML, it seems that wiki syntax is a natural
for some standardization.
--Jimbo
--
"Pianosa is een Italie" - first words of 50,000th article on
nl.wikipedia.org