MediaWiki & Wikimedia & rants robchurch on 29 Jul 2007 10:49 pm
We have, have we?
In idle browsing of MeatballWiki, which is something I never do often, I came across an interesting statement on http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiCreole:
Several wiki engines have agreed to jump on board (including MediaWiki and the Ward’s original WikiWikiWeb).
This is news to me, I have to admit; from what I can recall, in a mailing list thread sparked off with an announcement that WikiCreole was ready, I’m pretty sure several developers expressed doubt as to whether or not it was worthwhile implementing.
WikiCreole is dumbed-down and doesn’t support quite a lot of what MediaWiki’s native parser does. The WikiCreole people have so far failed to see the light in defining the parser behaviour, which is one of the biggest mistakes made in the history of MediaWiki development.
It’d be interesting to know whether or not I’m on crack, and if it has been agreed that we’ll implement this, why we felt it was appropriate, and who’s doing it.
Update: Following some comments from Brion, it seems that someone got the wrong impression after he expressed some initial support and made a tentative offer to experiment with an “alternative editing mode” supporting WikiCreole. On the whole, it’s not something we have a roadmap to support.
on 31 Jul 2007 at 9:53 pm 1.Phil Boswell said …
Sounds like a good excuse to trot out my perennial “thought development” (that’s like a thought experiment in that it’s all inside my head).
I had this idea where MediaWiki became more “OO” in that each namespace could be assigned a “handler” mechanism to deal with editing and displaying the content.
So for an “image” namespace, you could have an embedded editor like Inkscape. For a “music” namespace, you could embed Lilypond, or something similar. For “discussion” you could use something like Dave McCabe’s Liquid Threads, or default to regular wikitext if you wanted.
You could then have a “sub-class” of “text” which used a different syntax, and depended on its “handler” to translate into HTML/XML/WTFML depending what we’re using at that point.
My question is not “is it insane?”, because it obviously is, but “is it insane *enough*?”