[WMS] Thoughts on standards
- From: Erik Moeller <moeller@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: wiki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 06 Oct 2004 05:38:24 +0200
Hello friends,
I am one of the many people working on MediaWiki and Wikipedia. Here are
some general thought on standards, and on this effort in particular.
1) Any major change of the standards on a huge site like Wikipedia is
hard to implement given user resistance. There are minor details that
can be improved and made more consistent, of course.
2) A few people on the MediaWiki development team are working on a
wikitext->XML->HTML parser. This strikes me as the more immediately
useful approach. If all wiki engines become capable of rendering the
same XML code, then conversion between wikis becomes trivial. (Just
using XHTML and namespaces for wiki-specific markup may also be an
option, but may be more confusing.)
Beyond that, I believe that we should try to distinguish different
"groups" of standards and standardize within these: the UseMod-likes,
the TWiki-likes, and so forth.
I hate to say it, but CamelCase is a big barrier. CamelCase links cannot
be usefully automatically converted. How is the program supposed to know
that "MicroSoft" is "Microsoft" and not "Micro Soft" or "MicroSoft"?
3) I think this effort right now is too narrow. The markup syntax is not
the only aspect of wiki tech that we need standards on, and not even the
most important one. Here's a few I can think of:
* WikiSpam. There have been discussions about a shared blacklist but
IIRC nothing has come into place yet. Here we need to mostly agree
on who will be allowed to make additions to the blacklist. To make
it wiki-like, a cross-wiki way to review the contributions by one
IP address would be good. Still we need to be aware of the spammers
trying everything they can to get off the blacklist - at least some
barrier to entry may be desirable.
* Extension standard. I'm not just talking about the syntax. Many
extensions (graphs, latex, etc.) work according to the same scheme:
get some input from the wiki, generate some output. It would be nice
to be able to take an extension of this type and plug it into any
wiki.
* Cross-wiki transclusion. We all know about InterWiki links, but what
about transcluding content from one wiki to another? This could work
like this:
{{MeatBall:WikiMarkupStandardWorkingGroup#Goals}}
would transclude (dynamically include) the "Goals" section of the
markup standard page in a wiki. Of course that content should be
cached. For this it is necessary that all wikis send last-modified
headers.
* Copyright metadata. Most of the smaller wikis have no copyright
information at all, let alone machine-readable metadata in a format
like RDF. This also extends to copyright on pages. Wikis which do not
use a free license or the public domain should at least provide some
way by which newly created pages or individual contributions can be
licensed.
This is absolutely essential for transclusion. The transclusion
mechanism must be able to check whether it is legally allowed to do
what the user tells it to do.
Having no copyright statement on individual pieces of content is bad,
bad, bad, because *everything* is copyrighted by default. This is a
bug in the copyright system and the only way to fix it is to give
people an easy way to take their stuff out of that system.
* In a similar vein, page import and export including page histories.
Again, XML would be useful here. MediaWiki already has the export,
the import was still beta last time I checked. Note that MediaWiki
XML just puts the wikitext into one element.
* Certification. I believe it will be generally useful to have a
process by which we can certify that a wiki engine complies with
standards X, Y, and Z. This will make choosing a good wiki a lot
easier.
In a wiki-manner, this process should be open and consensus-based:
no consensus, no certification. Here it helps to use what we call
"actionability" on Wikipedia. If an objection to certification is
not actionable, it can be ignored.
There's more, obviously. My point is that we shouldn't limit ourselves
to working together in only one field. Now, I agree that we should first
focus on addressing the markup situation, but we should make our mission
statement broader than that so that this effort will lead into a new era
of cooperation among wiki developers.
Regards,
Erik
Other related posts:
