----- Original Message -----
From: "Neil Harris"
<neil(a)tonal.clara.co.uk>
I think it cannot be emphasized enough that what's
valuable about
Wikipedia and other similar wikis is the hard-won _content_, not the
software used to write and display it at any given, which is merely a
means to that end.
Fashions in programming languages and data formats come and go, but
the person-centuries of writing effort already embodied in Mediawiki's
wikitext format needs to have a much longer lifespan: having a
well-defined syntax for its current wikitext format will allow the
content itself to continue to be maintained for the long term, beyond
the restrictions of its current software or encoding format.
The project of creating a formal specification for Mediawikitext was one
of the primary reasons for the creation of the (largely dormant) wikitext-l
list. I fell off shortly after it was created myself, so I don't know how
far along that project got -- except that I know that it was decided that
since MWtext was not -- and could not be -- a strict subset of Creole,
that Creole was a Pretty Nice Idea... and we had no time for it.
For my money, that means the Creole folks lost[1], but what do I know.
Cheers,
-- jra
[1] Which is not incompatible with observations then that MWtext has some
really unaccepable boners in itself...