David Van Couvering 's Blog

Wiki Madness

I have loved Wikis for many years. I first discovered them back in 2000 and tried to convince the engineering team I was working with at the time to start using them. They would have nothing of it. As a matter of fact, I was working with Francois Orsini back then, and I particularly remember him scoffing at it and not understanding the point.

Anyway, as more and more Wiki providers have popped up, various teams I have worked with have adopted one or the other. Within Sun I think we use at least three different Wiki providers across various product groups.

What is amazing is that each one of these has decided they want to define the Wiki format differently. It's just maddening. Right now it's particularly painful because the tools internal Wiki uses Twiki and the external NetBeans wiki uses JSPWiki. When I was offline I wrote an entire page using the wrong format, and now I am spending a tedious half an hour that seems like two hours reformatting the whole thing.

What I want to know is, how could something so popular have absolutely no standard? This is actually not just an inconvenience, it's crucial for export/import that gives you data portability. Does anyone know if a standard is getting defined?

As I write this, I realize there must be somebody who got as tired of this as I did and wrote a translation utility for Wiki formats. Time to do some Googling.

Comments

• I know, i know!!! Because everybody has his own "better than HTML" format!!! The only thing is, since everybody wants to reinvent the wheel and nobody wants a standard (evil word in open-source world :), you get stuck with this "inventiveness" of +-+-+-+- standing for <h4>

  Posted by: kirillcool on January 26, 2007 at 07:51 PM

• A standard wiki format would be a good thing.

  There is, however, a standard for describing your own Wiki syntax and for converting it automatically to XML, and which has an open source implementation (SP) that comes with some Linuxes. This is ISO 8879:1986 SGML. It can handle many (though certainly not all) of the Wiki variants and features. See http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/03/03/sgmlwiki.html for details.

  Posted by: jelliffe_rick on January 27, 2007 at 02:41 AM

• This is why I __hate__ Wikis. I appreciate the "collaborative writing" idea, but the use of an alternate language to HTML is just foolish. Yes, formal languages such as HTML are rather verbose, but the advantage is portability. This is basically the purpose of standards. And when people start inventing something else just to save a couple of keystrokes, in the end the result is a total mess.

  Posted by: fabriziogiudici on January 27, 2007 at 04:56 AM

• "only thing is, since everybody wants to reinvent the wheel and nobody wants a standard (evil word in open-source world :), you get stuck with this "inventiveness" of +-+-+-+- standing for "
  No, you got that wrong. Everyone wants standards but noone wants to conform to a standard someone else created, they all want to be the one to define the standard and get their name into the anal(s) of computing history.

  Posted by: jwenting on January 29, 2007 at 05:42 AM

• Standards are wonderful things. Let's have lots!

  Posted by: lorenzhawkes on January 29, 2007 at 08:24 AM

• I totally agree. We've been using JSPWiki, but now are using Trac for task/bug tracking, and I'd love to just use the Trac wiki, too. But I can find no way to translate from one to the other. It is maddening.

  Posted by: javalori on January 29, 2007 at 08:27 AM

• 
  In defense of Wikis - their power is not about inventing a new, "easier" syntax. It's about fostering a read-write web by combining web page development and publishing in one easy step. Taking FTP out of the loop is I think the key win. Another great power it had was "auto-linking" by using the WikiWordSyntax to quickly create new links and refer to existing links. Oh, and automatic history management, so I can see what changed and by whome. None of this is there for standard HTML publishing.

  I suppose they could have done the markup in HTML, but that's not too approachable. The Wiki markup made it possible for mere mortals to put together and publish a web page.

  But I think that now that we have WYSWYG editors, we can go back to WYSWYG or HTML, much like many of the blog tools do now, and let Wiki Markup slowly and quietly fade away... Although I still liki WikiWords and auto-linking, I wouldn't want to give that up.

  Posted by: davidvc on January 29, 2007 at 10:36 AM

• David, I find html easy to read and write but have trouble with wiki markup...

  Posted by: jwenting on January 29, 2007 at 11:06 AM

• I also thought it would be interesting to write a wiki conversion tool and started working on one over a year ago. I got pretty fired up about the concept given the momentum of wikis. At the time I was also working for a client using Confluence. Granted it is a one way conversion, but there has to be some standard to start with right? :)
  Wiki Converter

  To some degree several wiki features are standard. They all define how to describe simple formatting (bold, italics, etc). They also all define how to reference links and attachments. The syntax is different but those concepts are at least pretty uniform.

  However one challenge is that most wikis have their own unique features. When you convert one to another one lacking features of the original you either have let those bits break or recreate them in your target wiki.

  The real difficulty in converting then comes with the edge cases....for instance PmWiki has close to twenty slightly different variants of link and attachment definitions. This proliferation of ways to do things is shared by Twiki and many of the others. It is not insurmountable but does prove to be a time sink. My sense is that different developers came along saying "wouldn't it be great if we could also define links in this way and this other way".

  Once a wiki instance becomes popular users discover ways to write syntax that were never inteded by the designers and become a real challenge to convert. I'm converting a wiki with over about 4000 pages and have been thouroughly impressed by the creativity of the users.
  

  Posted by: bpattesr7 on January 30, 2007 at 01:47 PM

• It's not that I did not understand the point back then - It is more like I did not see that needed - slight difference ;) - I guess it depends on your work style and if you have the proper tools to edit content quickly - I still does not use it much as I find it not intuitive enough to add formatted content and supercede HTML - it can vary based on the different wiki's out there...So yes, some tools are needed in that respect, I have to agree...

  Posted by: forsini on March 06, 2007 at 05:10 PM

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