[Wikipedia-l] A vision for wiki syntax, documented

Thu May 15 08:36:30 UTC 2003

LDC wrote:
><http://www.piclab.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Wikipedia_Text_Syntax>
>
>So as I said, this is a vision. I invite comment 
>and criticism. But I think it's important to 
>Wikipedia's future that we do a good job of this.

I agree - but when you said "ALL HTML is forbidden" I went ahead and looked at 
the table specification part of your document and saw some things that seem 
rather Spartan to me. For example, the document doesn't indicate whether or 
not nested tables would be allowed and it doesn't seem to say how one would 
do bgcolor-type cell fills, or how to set border width.

If those things cannot be replicated in wikicode then all the 
already-converted elements, country, ship, organism and battle tables would  
be broken (not to mention the main pages of fr.wiki, ja.wiki, eo.wiki and 
others - including a partially crippled en.wiki Main Page) . This would be a 
very bad thing and I for one would be not be too happy if much of the work 
I've done with the Elements project over the past year is destroyed (not to 
mention the several other WikiProjects I helped nurture).

So if the table at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beryllium cannot be 
replicated pretty much as-is in wikicode then I for will have a fit (I'm sure 
many others will join me). 

Also; if all HTML is going to be 'forbidden' then what do we do with all the 
HTML we already have? Fire-up the Conversion Script again perhaps (just when 
I was about to pass the damn thing on the Most Active Wikipedian's page! ;). 

An alternative solution is to only allow HTML syntax to be rendered if it is 
in a table:namespace page. So the HTML table code in [[Beryllium]] could be 
placed at http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table:Beryllium and in the Beryllium 
article that table can be displayed by typing [[table:Beryllium]] (much like 
the image:namespace now works). Your more simple table wikicode could then be 
used for less complex and shorter tables.

That way the dense table code now in [[Beryllium]] won't be in the way of 
users who are only concerned about editing the prose of the article (even a 
wikicode table would be dense and intimidating to many people).

A more long-term solution is to have a WYSIWYG GUI - then grandma can edit 
even a very complex table by clicking inside the cell she wants to write in. 

Please forgive me if these things are already explained somewhere in the 
document - I only had time to glance at a few sections.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)