Re: [gentoo-dev] [Gentoo Phoenix] an official Gentoo wiki

[Ed W <lists@wildgooses.com>]

On 05/04/2010 03:43, Ben de Groot wrote:
> On 5 April 2010 03:13, Joshua Saddler<nightmorph@gentoo.org>  wrote:
>    
>> Let the renderer take care of the final rendering, as really, tags and markup are all arbitrary. What should matter is how it appears in your webbrowser, since that'll vary from the source view anyways.
>>      
> So why are you such a staunch defender of GuideXML then? If markup is
> arbitrary really, then why not allow people to use what is convenient?
>
>    

I do think arguing about the syntax is the wrong target (as I think you 
agree above).

The magic of a wiki is:

- Focus on the text and not on the formatting
- Goal of simplicity to bang in a bunch of content without needing to 
worry about formatting
- Granularity of edits, eg edit a single word and not get overwritten by 
another change which edits a different single word
- Web based editing from any machine without installing stuff
- Extremely low barriers to contributing

I think these goals could be satisfied by a decent system around 
GuideXML as much as from an arbitrary Wiki engine?

The real magic is in getting lots of users to start contributing and 
that largely comes from having very few barriers to contributing.

If you remember the original Wikipedia it involved requiring to pass 
some tests to become a contributor and it was basically a closed editor 
system.  It failed dismally... The revamped wikipedia allowed anyone to 
edit and whilst we can debate the merits of the final product, it's 
certainly been popular.  So I claim that low barriers to entry and ease 
of editing is the real target - the markup is important, but definitely 
secondary to the engine itself


Good luck

Ed W