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

[phil jones]

Yeah, it's like herding cats.

Seriously .... you might as well join the Esperanto movement. Wikis
have got 10 years of history, and tens of millions of pages in
different standards. You won't get people to throw that away and
expect people to follow a single spec.

The good news is people muddle along OK with dozens of different human
languages. It's not hyper-efficient, but it makes for a rich culture.
Personally, I think that's OK for wikis too. As long as the particular
markup is easily discoverable (eg, noted on the "edit page") then most
people can figure it out.

phil

On Tue, Jun 3, 2008 at 7:48 AM, Mike Haseler <mike at lenzie.org.uk> wrote:
> 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
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