=-= Topic for #creole is “http://www.wikicreole.org/ | WikiSym workshop: http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Wikisym2007Workshop” =-= Topic for #creole was set by Radomir on Mo, 15. Okt 2007 18:15:29 Uhr good evening hello splitbrain Hi everyone :) Hi there were some more people asking about it, so maybe they will come later :) cool hi again :-) Hi splitbrain first of all, are any of you coming to WikiSym? I will I won't it'll be nice to see you again Andi I'm looking forward to meet you again, will Christoph be there, too? yep great so, I'm thinking we could just go over the questions on http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Wikisym2007Workshop but is there anything critical missing there? It's fine by me I'm not sure what testing relates to trying Creole with users ah okay I know when I lectured at FrOSCon, someone asked me if we've done tests, and I had to honestly answer, "Not many." all the ones I knew were done by Radomir I have to admit I do not know a single wiki using CREOLE yet seems like the only active one is www.wikicreole.org I'm installing creole on all wikis that I make for my friends Some real wiki have included some creole markup, haven't they? http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/WikisSupportingCreole just reading http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/WikisSupportingCreole :-) hehe in stereo even I will have to do some catchup reading before wikisym... I havent monitored reent efforts very closely yeah, outside of WikiCreole, I'd say none of those wikis have an active community * Radomir removes one dead wiki maybe I can present an updated 1.0 plugin for DokuWiki at WikiSym ;-) lol, my point exactly that would be great! ChuckSmith: a friend runs his department's site on a wiki engine, and he even recently got the people to edit their home pages... Calerga should release Sysquake 4 which will use Creole for its help files and more I should talk to the guy who runs the two Esperanto wikis to see how they are coming along but Sysquake isn't a wiki I guess we should invest in migration tools :) yeah, it's really hard to move a wiki community over to Creole, eh? a brainwashing machine that would convert users used to mediawiki markup to ones prefering Creole... (hey, I'm already Canadian, eh?) * Radomir slaps ChuckSmith with a moose ow, what was that all aboot?! it's funny, everytime I look at the creole cheat sheet I think "hey that's nearly DokuWiki syntax" Andi, just the headers, right? and text, maybe... AndreasGohr: we made it so intentionally, it's like this with many wiki engines and Andi, you have to admit you had quite a lot of influence during the WikiSym Workshop... I didn't notice it until it was over. :) Radomir, I know... but I'm amazed how well it worked everytime again ;-) AndreasGohr: I guess it's just "the right markup" if several teams come up with similar solution to the same problem... ah, I notice the Esperanto wikis run on DokuWiki ChuckSmith, hehe I wasn't sure about that back then ;-) so, should we start at the top? sure How many people are aware of Creole? I find most people in the wiki community to be aware of it... whether positively or negatively... good question, any ideas how this could be evaluated? and also, aware in what community? I'm not really in the wiki community. I know someone who's porting NME to Delphi. if you ask a typical Wikipedia user or a wiki developer, you'd get widely different answers a survey perhaps but how to distribute it? that's what I just thought ChuckSmith, have you seen those anti-schaeuble triangles in the last time on german websites? you'd ideally want a stratefied sampling a creole page on wikipedia, and then a lot of noise to attract people in the discussion page anti-schaeuble triangles?? I remember there used to be people popping up on #wiki and asking for the 'standard wiki markup' we could use something like this to promote the survey on different wikis they don't appear anymore you don't need lots of noise just create a Creole article ChuckSmith, gimme a moment an hour later, it goes to AfD discussion ensues hey, I can talk about Creole on my LUG meeting in two weeks :) well for a user survey you need to reach the common wiki user cool and the question then is "what is the common wiki user?" I believe Radomir made a list of wiki profiles on Creole well that's why I suggested to spread the survey over as many wikis installs as possible ChuckSmith: I've heard they keep him in a vault in Geneva, under a belljar actually, I think a good way would be with wikimatrix could we put a survey there? there you get all the wiki people sure, but I'm not sure it's representative although a bit biased since you do mention Creole there AndreasGohr: I think we are ok to live with bias the question is how could we reach the largest audience without spamming? ChuckSmith, here is what I meant: http://www.dataloo.de/ak-vorratsdatenspeicherung-demo/pagepeel.html see the thing in the upper right corner? I think I saw one of those once but then again I don't visit German sites too often :) if could get a few popular wiki to add something like this for linking we could attract a lot of users I think and how would you propose doing that? we could also potentially put a survey on wikicreole.org and try to get as many links to it as possible well we're going to meet a lot of wiki people... ah true, WikiSym ChuckSmith, yes that's exactly what I mean C2 is popular, isn't it? another question put the survey at wikicreole then let wiki people link to it sounds reasonable are we really prepared to start attracting users to wikicreole wiki? I don't see why we don't attract them there. it's been locked up for the last few weeks we opened it a few days ago What about having a static home page, as Radomir suggested? precisely because it attracted a wrong user we could also just lock the home page in a way, it would also be good to have a more marketing feel to the site for newcomers yes, that would be a good idea but I know the marketing feel often is repelling to open source developers :) ChuckSmith, have you talked to the wikipatterns huys about creole? ChuckSmith: the opensource developers a ready to make one more click :) there's the top-down approach where developers add Creole support and the bottom-up approach where users ask for Creole support from developers wikipatterns? looks like I'm out of the loop on that one wikipatterns.com excellent design with great content oh, this is like what was desired by spreadwiki.org exactly! which I believe has since been registered by a domain squatter really interesting website will have to explore it tomorrow spreadwiki.org is registered to wikihow I forgot about it completely ah btw, tomorrow I will take this chat and summarize it and add it to the Workshop page ChuckSmith: you might be right about the polished look and appaling developers -- I didn't even think about editiong wikipatterns or contacting them in any way, the site looks "finished" it's financed by atlassian but quite engine neutral It's the same with TWiki and JSPWiki although I personally think JSPWiki is a superior product, TWiki does the marketing jspwiki.org is aimed at developers twiki.org is aimed at decision-makers whatever works for them I also know that AboutUs is quite interested in spreadwiki okay so we agree about a survey being a good idea? yeah, I'm adding it to the Workshop page now yes so we should try to find the most important questions for the survey in the workshop, right? I wonder about that logo, having a logo would be nice :) ok, I updated the Workshop page http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Wikisym2007Workshop so, another thing to do at the workshop would be to develop a survey I wonder -- user feedback often lets you find mis-implemented, broken or missing features I think Rut Jesus could help with that... but I'd have to ask her. she's doing social research on Wikipedia usage but how do you identify implemented but rarely used features? I think a survey would ask if people feel a need for a common wiki markup and ask if they've heard of Creole and what their opinion of it is I'm making a Survey page on WikiCreole now. very, very rough draft: http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Survey we should also gather some general data, age, wiki affinity, which other syntaxes they know and use... ok, let me add that now And "How many wiki engines" rather than "multiple" I changed it to "Which wiki engines do you use?" And which other lighweight markup? (doxygen etc.) ok, you can refresh the survey I'm just trying to get some kind of basic structure at this point not have a nice sounding survey :) all improvements are welcome I suggest to go on with the list good idea I guess we already answered "How many people are using it?" just the WikiCreole community itself and a few of our friends :-) but, at least we're using it :) that'd be about two dozens, I think 50 at least we calculated that 50 people have worked with WikiCreole I think I counted the list of people on the People page If you add the anonymous spammers ;) so, what tests have been done for Creole? I don't think the spam had Creole in it. :) hehe right that would have been a big success ;-) but we could put that Creole would be beneficial for spammers, because they wouldn't have to convert their syntax in each wiki ... er, maybe not :) I've opened the wikis for studentexperiment, but the content doesn't use much markup ChuckSmith: spammers are after guestbooks and blogs anyways Radomir, could you briefly summarize your testing experience under this point on the wiki? hmm maybe we could get the spammers to sponsor us ;-) Just a side question: has anybody used placeholders? AndreasGohr: do we have any creole-related expenses? we could hire a designer YvesPiguet: no :) no, they were originally for MediaWiki although I hear JSPWiki is considering using them AndreasGohr: uh, oh! pick me! pick me! hehe who could hire a designer? :) would be worth looking for financing at WikiSym that would be cool it would be really great to have some student power from universities I'll try at mine I'd like to get some money into Creole so we could hire a designer, for example ... print t-shirts maybe pay for development of Creole on certain hard-to-influence wiki engines bribe wiki admins to install the creole syntax ;-) exactly :) is there a spam wiki ... ? just kidding, having a budget for creole marketing would be great chonqed.org ? interesting site anyway, I think financing stuff should be discussed at WikiSym perhaps it could be a workgroup during our workshop ok, added financing to the Workshop list Radomir, could you answer the questions under Testing, or do you feel that nothing can be learned from them? ChuckSmith: any news about online presence at workshop? I doubt it's going to happen in much quality. just happens to be whether the venue has a decent mic or not also, I'm not sure how we would broadcast ChuckSmith: I see ChuckSmith: I actually only have one wiki that could be considered real test ChuckSmith: http://sylabus.wmid.amu.edu.pl/RecentChanges ChuckSmith: the users are professors on my university if you could add some information on the workshop page, that would be great or link to it... I think you wrote extensively about it already ChuckSmith: they were required to fill in the lecture descriptions ha, just got a reply from the guy running the Esperanto wikis... he says that for him it is more comfortable to use Creole than DokuWiki syntax bah ;-) that's a good thing :-P hehe so, are you editing the page now or should we move on? or should we move on while you edit the page? ;) let's move on k What isn't working in Creole? hard to say ChuckSmith: escaping! ;) that's hard for me to answer... I have to wonder if the escape character is slowing adoption though... seriously, yes and second place: arcane list rules perhaps escaping should've been put under Additions... converting from other formats while making sure that everything that should be escaped really is isn't that trivial no, it's extremely useful still it seems to me that it would be useful to have wiki engines that have Creole implemented except for escaping it isn't the escaping mechanism which is problematic, but the necessity to escape stuff which is common because I have the feeling that making the Creole parser is half the work, and developing the escaping is the other half such as double-star at the beginning of a line if you want to have bold, you have to make sure that it doesn't appear at the beginning of a line in the context of a list ChuckSmith: one is sure, escaping and lists require most attention if Creole was ever to be further developed to convert from HTML (XML), I chose to avoid any line break in paragraphs and list items to avoid this problem what is wrong with lists? I guess what I'm saying is that if these are problems with Creole, how could we fix them? ChuckSmith: the 'avoid conflict with bold' rules complicate things greatly if you embed line breaks in list items, you can easily have double-stars which are misinterpreted same problem with sharp if you support monospace uhm, I just noticed one thing that really slows down adoption... reoccuring discussions about changing the syntax :D that's why we froze 1.0 :) AndreasGohr: we are not changin anything now :) I'm not suggesting changes, but maybe we should better document that sort of potential problems yes, and we should really not discuss about this AndreasGohr: sweep it under the rug? not in front of potential implementors here and now you mean? then again, if we really did make a mistake, we should correct it AndreasGohr: you usually document especially well the parts that are 'hairy' AndreasGohr: and these parts of creole are certainly hairy doumenting is fine the problem is mostly with automatic translation sugessting they are about to change is bad real people can use preview and correct, and learn AndreasGohr: we suggest that? sounds like well, I wanted to get feedback on that AndreasGohr: sorry, wasn't my intention to me as an "outsider" AndreasGohr: I guess I got in a rut The ambiguity is well known by all the people participating to Creole discussions in March-June 07 but, for example, if we say that escaping is optional, that would speed up adoption, but yet result in not so great of implementations, I believe the only change I could see us making now would be making something that is mandatory and making it optional ChuckSmith: we are not making escaping optional now ok :) I think we should all stand together behind the 1.0 spec as it is I don't suggest any change, __especially not removing escape from the core__ so, the question is not how to solve the problems, but how to make the problems easier? and offer help implementing the hairy parts exactly yes ChuckSmith: I think there was a page for implementation notes somewhere? I think it's http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Ambiguities I wonder if it could be useful to set up a Creole developers mailing list. wikis are great, but sometimes you just want to ask a question to the community irc channels are excellent for that yeah, but IRC channels don't reach everyone just a few select people who happen to be online at that moment Support for multilevel indenting in wikicreole would help for threaded discussions isn't that in additions? yes a mailinglist or forum would be fine wikis suck for discussions IMHO I mean, my experience with the Esperanto Wikipedia is that a mailing list is necessary after a while. I always had the policy that discussion should remain on the wiki, but important things just don't get read. I wonder if I should document the "(? or we could take over the wiki-standards mailing list ;) is it a regex??? which is practically only WikiCreole from what I've seen.... YvesPiguet: yes are you all on the wiki-standards mailing list? ChuckSmith: good idea actually ok, then I'll stick with C :D hehe, yeah let's take it I think Dirk made that list, so I can see what he thinks about that at WikiSym actually, he's online now, I'll ask :) YvesPiguet: it means "// except when preceded by a :" thanks! I haven't seen any non-WikiCreole discussions on there lately it's usually just me posting some announcement about Creole ChuckSmith: I haven't seen any ChuckSmith: discussions, I mean and actually, WikiCreole isn't a standard, right? ;) ChuckSmith: not yet ;) standards usually work the other way around Radomir: one more reason I wasn't very pleased with too smart heuristics... first you use them, then somebody comes and says 'hey, lets write it down' no reply from Dirk :) no reply means yes ;-) so, we basically conclude that the problems should be alleviated by better communication between implementers, right? How much would it cost to make it endorsed by ECMA? :) ChuckSmith, good summary probably a few thousand euros at least ChuckSmith: sometimes I think we should only have the general rules like 'use [[...]] for links' and 'use * for marking lists' and let the developers work out the fine details, then describe what they came up with in creole 2.0 ChuckSmith: lets have Microsoft sponsor us you go from something like XML-RPC to SOAP :\ and lets rename WikiCreole to WikiPOSIX ;) ok, updated Workshop page we should make Creole only run on Windows, good idea... let me add that ... that way it can't be corrupted by those evil other toy operating systems ;) [sent from my Macbook] ;) I wonder if the talk pages don't discourage refactoring... (sorry for ot) I think they're fine I think most people would rather see a full discussion if they go to the trouble of reading the discussion in the first place. I could be wrong though. [Dirk Riehle went away.] ChuckSmith: I think that some people who bothered to ask on the wiki simply missed the talk pages what people? ChuckSmith: remember? we were pointing peole to discussions, and then they said "aah, ok" ah ok :) ChuckSmith: or maybe I'm making something up so, next question: How does WikiCreole relate, in the long run, to Markdown or Textile? ChuckSmith: at the beginning of this year, I think it's better and superior ;-) seems like I remember that, but that happens in all wiki communities... people have to learn the structure ChuckSmith: it's better tuned for wikis, but not as universal or simple Markdown and Textile, be more like Creole :) I think having a simple PHP/Perl/Ruby/Python class to plug creole into anything would help adoption Creole is better designed for collaborative editing, I would say. AndreasGohr: I have a python module for that see http://www.wikicreole.org/wiki/Converters the CREOLE syntax is more sane, more intuitive for humans Any news from Crossmark? I talked to Thomas and I will release the parser part (without the moin glue) on BSD licence ah great hmm, the Python links to MoinMoin, but doesn't link directly to any function :( the Python solution exists, go find it! :) Their reference page as linked from Wikipedia is broken ChuckSmith: I didn't? let me fix the link then ah, it's on the MoinMoin page nevermind my bad brain freeze If Crossmark was replaced by Creole for OLPC, it would be great for us you know we tried to work with Crossmark extensively have they continue working on it recently? I don't know they're too close to Markdown ok, link added :) great, thanks :) I know we don't need to baby developers with direct links, but everything helps a little. ChuckSmith: yes, sorry for being lazy don't ever apologize to me for being lazy :) sometimes I think you've done more for Creole than me :) I think as for Crossmark they had to either ally with Markdown or Creole they wanted to have it both ways, and discovered it wasn't possible and the Markdown was more influential but do they have an implementation? I guess that creole didn't look too appealing at the time :) I don't know, I stopped following it when they broke off. if you want to talk with them, I'd be happy to give you the contact I have there ok, I can try libcrossmark doesn't seem very advanced see http://svn.abisource.com/libcrossmark/ * Radomir waits for the cats to load... weird, it redirected me back to the editor discarding my changes :/ it looks like Dirk is saying we should start a new list it's what I assumed anyway... again * Radomir shrugs and walks away sorry, got to chatting with Dirk so to conclude this point, Creole is superior? ;-) yep! "Creole is more suitable for wikis and for collaborative editing." there's the official summary In ten years, will these be interchange formats, or will we still be encoding markup? ChuckSmith: creole doesn't mark up meaning nor looks