(A DRAFT IN PROCESS)

FOR RELEASE AFTER THE WIKICREOLE 1.0 LAUNCH, PLEASE DO **NOT** PUBLICIZE YET

After a year of diligent effort, a group of nearly 50 dedicated users and developers are proud to release [[Creole 1.0|WikiCreole 1.0]].  Creole is a common wiki markup language which does not replace existing markup, but instead enables wiki users to transfer content seamlessly across wikis, and for novice users to contribute more easily. This markup has evolved from all existing wiki markup, hence the name Creole: a stable language that originated from a non-trivial combination of two or more languages.  The problem is that every wiki software has its own markup which makes it difficult to teach a generic wiki markup, as well as for people to use more than one wiki engine regularly.  Having a common wiki markup also lays the foundation for wiki software to be developed to work across multiple wiki engines.

Ward Cunningham, the founder of wikis, coined the term Creole, just like he coined the name wiki from the Hawaiian ~WikiWiki. He suggested this name at Wikimania 2006 in Boston, the international Wikipedia conference, where we presented our first empirical analysis on existing markup variants. Cunningham’s idea was to create a common markup that was not standardization of an arbitrary existing markup, but rather a new markup language that was created out of the common elements of all existing engines out there.

Under this premise, existing wiki markup was extensively analyzed, and a subset of elements was compiled that would be as non-conflicting as possible.  Practitioners and wiki developers were then invited to come together in a workshop at [[WikiSym 2006]] in Denmark to introduce the idea of Creole and discuss how to proceed.  There, workshop participants went through different markup elements which they wanted to unify and added them to a wiki set up for this purpose. Afterwards, there was enough data to suggest a first version of the Creole spec, version 0.1. Many participants of the workshop also agreed to implement Creole into their software.

After the workshop, a wiki was set up with the workshop results. This wiki was used to give people that did not attend the Wiki Markup Standard Workshop the opportunity to discuss decisions made, and to be able to make their own proposals. A workflow was introduced that incrementally discussed and introduced these proposals into the spec. Discussion pages were used to talk about each topic. At the end of an iteration (4-8 weeks), a new version number was added to the spec.

Our decisions were consensus-driven meaning voting was discouraged, so there were opinion polls instead and later there was an attempt to reach an agreement. After many long months of cooperation, this working group finally reached a point where they were not able to find any more commonalities.  They knew then it was time to freeze Creole 1.0 for the next two years to allow time for adoption. The ~WikiCreole wiki (www.wikicreole.org) now has extensive reasoning through documentation of the empirical analysis and discussions of the elements that back up the spec.  Today, ten wiki engines support Creole and many more are planning to implement it in the coming months.  Wiki engine developers implementing ~WikiCreole in their parsers give a clear sign to the community of their readiness to cooperate to draw us all closer together, making life easier for everyone in the wiki world.

With the support of [[http://www.i3g.hs-heilbronn.de/|i3G]] (Interdisciplinary Institute for Intelligent Business Processes), Christoph Sauer and Chuck Smith have led the process with great help from the wiki developer community through its initial concept to 1.0.  The i3G, located in Heilbronn, Germany, is trying to overcome the barriers between computer science, engineering and business, through their selection of content and personnel. They are also developing customized concepts for small and medium-sized companies to help optimize operational workflow and its representation for IT systems.

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Feel free to contribute to the press release if I left out anything important!

--[[Chuck Smith]]