but the thing about wiki is it conatins many different ideas each of them where an eye opener to social software developers, it is these seperate ideas that are revolutionary and they're finding their way in all sorts of webapps seperatly.

the way I think of it Wikis introduced

• collaborative editing of docsuments using CVS style workflow
• no user classification at all, all users have the same rights
• workflow is transparent to end audience
• simplified structural markup readable by mere mortals
• cheap page creating (on the fly)
• flexible sitewide crossreferencing engine (on the fly)
• the revolutionary idea of managing information as a soup of unordered data plus the ability to create different views and organization for it (it could be cross linked, chained, put in a heirarchy, searched for etc, all easily cheaply and at the same time).
• the most revolutinary idea of letting humans manage the system not computers, while giving us human operators tools to make life easier (basically by making mistakes cost nothing and cause no chain reactions)

again Wikis are example of total seperation of policy and mechanism, a wiki gives you mechanism, wiki authors invent policy, many CMS systems are copying this idea (drupal is very much that), Wikis are the only ones where the policy is organic and ever changing and requires no further agreement.

the reason why there is a mess is because porogrammers do see these features or properties as seperate, non of them are the esence of wiki that has to be stabilized at some point in time.

a unified syntax would be nice but any attempt at making a syntax flexible enough to accomodate all needs will simply reinvent XML.

tab3an the situation would probably have been helped if either the first WikiWikiWeb or MediaWiki had the best syntax (seeing as they're obvious leaders) but truth is their syntax sucks in many ways.

cheers,
Alaa

http://www.manalaa.net "i`m feeling for the 2nd time like alice in wonderland reading el wafd"

I think standardising WikiWiki syntax is not really important. What is important about WikiWiki is not the mechanism, but rather the effect. Here I can identify with what Ala wrote above.

WikiWiki is not the web, and we do not actually need one standardised protocol for it. WYSIWYG developers will have to cope with that, and natural selection will take care of the rest. Necessating a standardisation cycle could slow improvement.

I agree with you on how Wikimedia should be a leader on this, but again this means that you should be actively promoting your criticisms and suggestions for development there; this is how WikiWiki works.

WikiWiki syntax is intended to be simple and not very clever to avoid complexity that will deter potential editors.

After thinking more; a solution could be to keep the user syntax as simple (and impaired) as it is, and have the WikiWiki engines output (and internally store?) their content in XML, which could then properly transformed, styled and dressed up for the human agent (browser), and still have the structure for machine consumption.

This will allow for migration, cross XLinking and querying, and WYSIWYG-tools streamlining as you propose, but this does not have to be reflected in the front-end human UI were clueless people like myself edit. This will also allow for locally brewed WikiWiki versions whose developers would choose whether/when to provide machine interfacing.

I don't see this as reinventing XML, but rather as an application of it read 'schema'.

In this case, however, there will have to be another layer of mechanisms to translate between user syntax and machine/tool syntax.

Did this became (Too complex == too bad)?

What do you think?

... or an unofficial standard, kind of already exists. All wikis look very much the same to me.

I like wikis that understand html thought, I think HTML should be the standard in all wikis, and all the mere mortals can use the weird half baked formatting syntax, supreme immortals like me will use html to format their text.

Actually this might have a nice side effect, as it might discourage the mere mortals from modifying my posts in wikis!