[wiki-standards] Time for a real wiki standard!!!

[Mike Haseler]

I was just looking up some information on wikipedia (to which I have 
contributed a lot) and having worked on the creole parser, tried to 
enter two lots of text as bold as **Well done**.

The first use was just stars, the second turned into a series of bullet 
points.

So, I entered '''Well done''' and it was italic, so I entered ''Well 
done'' and it worked (or was it the other way around?).

The point I'm trying to make is that even the simplest text cannot be 
entered into a wiki without running into these stupid problems, and what 
should have been a one minute helping to improve the article, ended up 
being three edits simply to get the formatting right ... and in future I 
just won't bother!

The primary reason I've never got a wiki going on my own site (I can't 
run wikipedia) is that every wiki seems to be full of perverse oddities 
which I can't remember so how on earth can I expect those with less 
interest to bother to learn.

The first thing I looked at when evaluating wikis was: "Could I 
understand the mark up ... ".

It is time the wiki community realised that the public like me are fed 
up with this shambles. We don't care what character we have to use to 
make bold, italic, etc. etc. so long it is easy remember and the same 
where ever we have to use it.

Why when I go to PHPBB do I have to enter [b] or whatever it is, when I 
go to wikipedia it is ''' when I go somewhere else it is **Bold,  __bold 
or ...

Even Creole doesn't specify whether there can be a space between the 
**Bold** or ** bold ** when it seems obvious to me that ** on its own is 
an ambiguous character whereas **bold is not!!!

What the public like me wants the wiki/blog/bulletin board community to 
do, is to agree a standard, not a "wouldn't it be nice if" thing like 
creole which seems intent on avoiding upsetting anyone and in doing so 
will satisfy nobody, but a tough standard where there are clear rules as 
to what is, and what is not compliant.

What the public really wants is something like the W3C compatible symbol 
on website that says this blog, newsgroup, wiki is "KIRK compatible" so 
that they know how to **boldly go**.

I know that I am pissing into the wind, because getting wikis to be 
compatible is like herding cats ... and the reason wikis are all 
different is that wikis are fundamentally anti-rules, ...

What I would like to know is there anybody else out there who would be 
willing to actually develop a clear mandatory and user-centric 
specification?

Mike