(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 augments existing markup to enable wiki users to transfer content seamlessly across wikis, a boon to novice and expert users alike. This markup has emerged from all existing wiki markup, hence the name Creole: a stable language that originated from a combination of two or more languages.  Every wiki software has its own markup, making them difficult for novices to learn and experts to remember.  A common wiki markup lays the foundation for development of cross-engine wiki software.

Wiki founder Ward Cunningham coined the name "wiki" from the Hawaiian ~WikiWiki, and suggested the name Creole at Wikimania 2006 in Boston, the international Wikipedia conference, where the Wiki Creole Working Group presented its first empirical analysis on existing markup variants. Cunningham’s idea was to create a common markup that was not a standardization of an arbitrary existing markup, but rather a new markup language that was created out of the common elements of all existing engines.

Under this premise, the Wiki Creole Working Group analyzed existing wiki markup and compiled a greatest-common denominator subset of elements.  Practitioners and wiki developers were then invited to a workshop at [[WikiSym 2006]] in Denmark to learn about Creole and discuss how to proceed.  Workshop participants went through different markup elements which they wanted to unify and added them to a wiki created for this purpose. The resulting data justified a first version of the Creole spec, version 0.1. Many workshop participants also agreed to implement Creole into their software.

A wiki with the workshop results enabled people who did not attend to discuss the decisions made and 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.

The working group's decisions emphasized consensus instead of majority rule, so opinion polls were always followed by an attempt to reach mutual agreement. After many long months of cooperation, the working group finally reached a point of maximum commonalities. They knew then it was time to freeze Creole 1.0 for the next two years and 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.  Through their selection of content and personnel, the i3G, located in Heilbronn, Germany, is trying to overcome the barriers between computer science, engineering and business. 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]]