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

Thu May 15 23:00:15 UTC 2003

LDC wrote:
>There's no provision for nested tables. I don't think

>there's a good enough case for their necessity. Cell 
>backgrounds and borders can be done with styles.

Well I and many other very hard-working Wikipedians 
think there is a very real need for nested tables. 
They are used in each these converted articles;
organisms (that nested table has a border=0), 
countries, heads of state, elements, and sub-national 
entities. And this list doesn't include the many other

non-project related nested tables.

>> So if 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). 
>
>Yeah, that nested table is a nuisance. I'll have to
>think about that.

There are two nested tables; the obvious one in the 
isotopes section and the navigation nested table in 
the first cell of the larger table (which in turn has 
an image embedded in it). Both are necessary to the 
functioning of the table and are not a "nuisance" at 
all. 

>> An alternative solution is to only allow HTML 
>> syntax to be rendered if it is in a table:namespace

>> page.
>
>As I said before, I want to eliminate the complexity,

>not just move it around. I want newbies to have some 
>chance of being to edit the table as well as the 
>prose around it.

Do you have /any/ idea about how much work would be 
undone and have to be redone in a diminished format if

the document as is were implemented? Thousands of 
pages will be broken and many users, including me, may

get fed-up with Wikipedia and leave. 

A table is going to be dense and intimidating to 
nontechnical users no matter what but tables are very 
useful when it comes to effectively presenting tabular

data (something we have a lot of). Thus putting this 
complexity on a separate page seems to be a good 
compromise between preventing newbies from not being 
intimidated by hordes of markup and allowing more 
seasoned users the ability to present tabular data in 
a table. 

How the page functions for the reader is just as 
important as how it functions for the writer. And just

as different writers have different abilities to 
contribute prose to an article, we have different 
coders with different abilities to add markup
to articles. 

We don't dumb down the prose of articles to reach the 
lowest common denominator reader/writer (except for 
intro paragraphs) and we should not similarly dumb 
down the markup just to make things a bit easier for 
the lowest common denominator coder. Just segregate 
the tables from the prose and both the markup-
phobic and the markup gurus will be happy (that's not 
to say that I advocate for full HTML support; just 
move the HTML off of the regular article page and into

its own namespace). 

I would still like to know if a conversion script 
would be run. If not, then disabling HTML would make 
Wikipedia look badly broken with the displayed text of

tens of thousands of instances of HTML markup. And all

that would have to be re-coded in the new syntax by 
hand. If it is run then the script is going to 
mangle any table that has markup in it that is no 
supported in the proposed wikicode. Either way we are 
talking about changing masses of content that somebody

is going to have to repair.

Why in the world is it necessary to break so many 
things and therefore create so much added work? The 
negative side-effects of the proposed WikiSyntax will 
cause far more problems than it purports to solve, 
IMO. 

Please replicate in WikiCode the HTML we currently 
support (well, maybe not the obscure stuff that is 
hardly ever used) and/or create a table:namespace.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

PS - We've seem to have done fine during the past 2+
years with tolerating HTML where it makes sense (such
as tables).

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
http://search.yahoo.com