Steve Bennett wrote:
Just to check: Is changing MediaWiki sytnax absolutely
out of the
question? Using // and ** for italic and bold respectively would solve
that problem, be more consistent and more intuitive, and probably not
be excessively difficult to phase in, right?
Many would say that any such discussion is a dead end. However, I
think that is a bit narrow-minded. A syntax change on Wikipedia
might not be very likely, but you can of course change MediaWiki
for use on your own wiki website.
Changing to // and ** doesn't necessarily make the wiki syntax any
more BNF parsable than today, does it? You can still write *****
and what's that supposed to mean? If clarity is wanted, the best
would probably be <i> and <b>.
The current wiki syntax cannot be described in simple BNF, but it
is not impossible to parse. The MediaWiki engine successfully
converts it to HTML and, in the reverse direction, users who
intend to accomplish a result in bold and italics are able to
convert this intension into wiki syntax.
Thus, it is also possible to write a program that converts the
current Wikipedia dump into using <i> and <b> rather than
apostrophes, and then back again to traditional wiki syntax.
Since <i> and <b> are already supported, you could make it a
policy on your own wiki whether apostrophes should be deprecated.
To enforce such a policy, every stored article can be converted.
Such a policy is not very likely on Wikipedia, though.
What you can do is to run some experiments on the existing dump.
How many cases are there where ''''' is hard to resolve? Did
anybody count?
It is of course possible to write articles with unbalanced
apostrophes. If I write '''hey'' it will render as
'<i>hey</i>,
and that's also how a conversion program should leave it. How many
such user mistakes are there in the current dump? Perhaps somebody
is already running a robot to find and fix such errors?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se