[wiki-standards] WikiCreole 1.0 Press Release

[Janne Jalkanen]

Congrats!

/Janne

On 4 Jul 2007, at 15:00, Chuck Smith wrote:

> Link to this press release:
> http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/WikiCreolePressRelease
> To digg it: http://digg.com/software/ 
> WikiCreole_1_0_a_common_wiki_markup
>
> FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
>
> After a year of diligent effort, a group of nearly 50 dedicated users
> and developers are proud to release WikiCreole 1.0. Creole is designed
> to be a common wiki markup language which augments existing markup to
> enable wiki users to transfer content seamlessly across wikis, a boon
> to novice and expert users alike.
>
> Creole, taking its name from the field of linguistics, a stable
> language that originated from a combination of two or more languages.
> As every wiki software has its own markup definitions, the differences
> can make them difficult for novices to learn and experts to remember,
> thus a common wiki markup lays the foundation for development of
> cross-engine wiki software.
>
> The Creole name for a common markup was born from an idea of wiki
> founder Ward Cunningham at Wikimania 2006 the international Wikipedia
> conference. The goal: create a common markup that was not a
> standardization of an arbitrary existing markup, but rather a new
> markup language that was created out of the common elements of all
> existing engines. Under this premise the Wiki Creole Working Group
> analyzed existing wiki markup and compiled a greatest-common
> denominator subset of elements and presented its report.
>
> Practitioners and wiki developers were then invited to a workshop at
> WikiSym 2006 in Denmark to learn about Creole and discuss how to
> proceed. WikiSym is a symposium (conference) series dedicated to wiki
> research and practice. Participants evaluated different markup
> elements for possible unification and added them to a wiki created for
> this purpose. The resulting data resulted in the first version of the
> Creole spec, version 0.1. Many workshop participants also agreed to
> implement Creole into their existing wiki implementations.
>
> In true wiki fashion, the report and data were published to a wider
> audience who were unable to attend allowing them to discuss the
> decisions made and add their own proposals. An iterative workflow was
> introduced that discussed and introduced these new proposals into the
> spec. Discussion pages were used to address each topic and at the end
> of each iteration (4-8 weeks), a new version number was added to the
> spec.
>
> The working group's goal was to emphasize consensus instead of
> majority rule, so opinion polls were always followed by an attempt to
> reach mutual agreement. After many long months of cooperation, the
> working group finally reached a point of maximum commonalities. Creole
> 1.0 was then frozen for the next two years to allow time for adoption.
> The WikiCreole site (www.wikicreole.org) now has extensive
> documentation of the empirical analysis and discussions of the
> elements to support the decisions behind the spec. Today, ten wiki
> engines support Creole and many more are planning to implement it in
> the coming months. Wiki engine developers implementing WikiCreole in
> their parsers, give a clear sign to the community of their readiness
> to cooperate and draw us all closer together, making life easier for
> everyone in the wiki world.
>
> With the support of i3G (Interdisciplinary Institute for Intelligent
> Business Processes; Heilbronn, Germany), Christoph Sauer and Chuck
> Smith have led the process with great help from the wiki developer
> community through its initial concept to 1.0. Through their selection
> of content and personnel, i3G, is trying to overcome the barriers
> between computer science, engineering and business. They also develop
> customized concepts for companies to help optimize operational
> workflow and its representation for IT systems.
>
> For more details, contact Chuck Smith at +49 7131 504 474 or
> csmith(at)hs-heilbronn.de
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