Creole Wiki Markup, WikiOhana, and More Ward Wisdom

Several folks asked me on Saturday what I thought about the conference, and I kept saying, “It’s been great, except I haven’t had any interesting conversations about Wikis.” That changed in an unexpectedly generative way on Saturday afternoon, resulting in a new little cooperative effort we’re calling WikiOhana.    (KZ1)

At Thursday night’s conference party, I got reacquainted with Chuck Smith, whom I had met at Wikimania last year. Chuck is the founder of Esperanto Wikipedia and was the one who first introduced Brion Vibber — now the lead developer of Mediawiki — to the Wikipedia community. At the conference last year, Chuck met Christoph Sauer, a German Wiki researcher, and the two of them started working together.    (KZ2)

At the party, Chuck told me that he and Christoph had been working on a proposed WikiMarkup standard, and I loudly grimaced in response. At WikiSym last October, I made it clear to several people that I thought trying to standardize WikiMarkup was a noble waste of time.    (KZ3)

First, people are really attached to their own markup. Previous discussions about standardization usually started and ended with, “Great idea. Let’s just standardize on mine.”    (KZ4)

Second, WYSIWYG in theory obviates the value of a standard markup from a user’s perspective. It seemed more valuable to work out a standard interchange language, which WYSIWYG widgets could use to interact with different Wiki engines and which would make data migration between different Wiki engines easier. It also seemed like it would be easier to come to agreement on an interchange language. In fact, folks have already worked out a good proposal for an XHTML interchange language on the Interwiki mailing list (now migrated to the wiki-standards list) and on CommunityWiki.    (KZ5)

What made all this talk worse for me was that I thought that people were trying to go about this the wrong way. We were not going to come to agreement by group authoring a spec, then getting everyone to agree on it. The only way this was going to work was if a few Wikis came to some agreement and actually implemented the changes. This wouldn’t necessarily result in a standard, but it could act as a catalyst that could lead to a standard. Sunir Shah has been advocating this approach for a long time, to no avail. I would have organized such an effort myself, except that I didn’t think it was important enough to spend any time on it.    (KZ6)

Chuck and Christoph changed my mind. Chuck explained that he and Christoph had extensively analyzed existing Wiki markup, and they had taken pains to come up with a small subset of things that would be as noncontroversial as possible. (There had been a similar effort by others to do such an analysis before, but it hadn’t gotten very far.) They were going to present the results at WikiSym in a few weeks, but they had prepared a poster for Wikimania. Still clucking my disapproval, I promised Chuck that I would check out his poster.    (KZ7)

On Saturday, I finally made some time to check out the poster. I studied it and found myself thinking, “Hmm. This isn’t bad.” Chuck came over later, and we started going over it in depth. I still have some issues with it (discussed below), but I told him, “You know what, this is almost good enough for us to adopt in PurpleWiki. But you really should find one or two other Wikis who might say the same.” We kicked a few ideas around, and then I said, “Let’s go see what Ward thinks.”    (KZ8)

So we rounded up Ward Cunningham, and he took a look and started asking questions. He seemed to be okay with the answers, because he said that if someone were to write a Perl function that converted from his markup to the proposed markup and vice versa, he would consider incorporating it into his Wiki.    (KZ9)

Creole Markup    (KZA)

Well, you know me. Low-hanging fruit, a spare hour before the next party. The long and the short of it is, half of the converter now exists. It’s called Creole, and it’s written in Perl. Currently, it consists of a brain-dead simple script that converts Ward’s markup into Creole Markup (Chuck and Christoph’s proposal) and some tests.    (KZB)

The name was Ward’s suggestion. Rather than call it “pidgin,” which is what it actually is (a non-native language cobbled together from two or three other languages), we chose to optimistically call it “creole” (a native language that emerges from a pidgin), which is what we hope it will become.    (KZC)

I have three issues with the current proposal. First, I don’t like the exclamation point syntax for headers, not because of the character itself, but because of the numbering:    (KZD)

!!!Heading 1 !!Heading 2 !Heading 3    (KZE)

As you can see, you need to remember that a top-level header has three exclamation points, not one, and you are only capable of having three levels of headers. The advantage of the equals syntax:    (KZF)

= Heading 1 = == Heading 2 == === Heading 3 ===    (KZP)

is that the heading level is represented by the indentation.    (KZQ)

Second, there needs to be a proposal for preformatted blocks.    (KZR)

Third, the spec isn’t rigorous enough. You have to answer questions like, “Will italics work across multiple lines or blocks?” The reason I didn’t write a Creole-to-Ward converter was that these questions were not yet answered.    (KZS)

Most of the time developing the Creole converter was actually spent reverse engineering Ward’s markup. Ward pointed me to a Literate Programming version of his source code — implemented in a Wiki, of course — which helped a lot. As it turns out, Ward’s been thinking a bit about how to write a good markup parser recently. Parsers are often on my mind as well, as we’ve been talking about rewriting the PurpleWiki parser forever. Plus, the topic came up at Hacking Days among the Mediawiki developers before the conference. We’ll probably noodle on this problem a bit both before and during WikiSym. Fortunately, Ward knows a lot more about writing parsers than I, as anyone who’s seen the PurpleWiki code can attest.    (KZT)

WikiOhana    (KZJ)

When we were discussing names, Christoph proposed “ohana,” which means “family” in Hawaiian. It has a wonderful connotation — respecting our individuality while emphasizing the bonds that keep us together in a positive, welcoming fashion. It’s also consistent with Ward’s original naming convention, as “WikiWiki” means “quick” in Hawaiian.    (KZU)

We decided to call our little cooperative effort, WikiOhana, of which Creole Markup is a first project. We hope the family grows over time.    (KZV)

More Ward Wisdom    (KZK)

While retelling an experience he had writing a parser, Ward said, “That’s when I learned how to write beautiful code: Get it working, then spend the same amount of time making it better.”    (KZW)

WikiSym 2006 Program

The WikiSym 2006 program is set. Guess who’s keynoting (with Doug Engelbart). That’s right, I’ll be talking Wiki philosophy and showing off some HyperScope goodness. I’ll also be moderating an interactive session on the Future of Wikis, featuring the other WikiSym keynoters (Ward Cunningham, Angela Beesley, Mark Bernstein) and the illustrious Sunir Shah.    (KY0)

I got back from Wikimania late last night with much news to report, and I’m really looking forward to WikiSym in two weeks. I was originally skeptical about having two Wiki conferences in a month, but now, I’m looking forward to continuing some of the conversations we had this past weekend as well as seeing many other core members of the Wiki community. Plus, the program looks fantastic and there will be an Open Space component as well, organized by Ted Ernst and facilitated by Gerard Muller.    (KY1)

To top it all off, it’ll be in Odense, Denmark. I’ll be in Copenhagen from August 17-20, so if you’d like to meet up earlier, drop me a line. Thomas Madsen Mygdal, the creator of Reboot, has graciously offered to organize a meetup. More on that as details come.    (KY2)

WikiMania 2006, Day One

Day one is over. Brain is overloaded. Very tired. Attending conference during day/evening, then working late into night — bad. Law school dorms with no air conditioning in Cambridge in August — also bad.    (KWO)

Still, much to share. And amazingly enough, I will — at least a bit. There’s something about this conference that actually gets me to blog, rather than simply promising I will. Besides, I’m going to set a new record for responsiveness to Tom Maddox, even if it is via blog.    (KWP)

It is incredibly surreal to be back at my alma mater surrounded by post-college friends and colleagues. What makes it even more surreal is that folks from all facets of my professional life seem to be here, not just Wiki folks. I mentioned having my fingers in a lot of pies, right? Well, all those pies are unexpectedly well represented this weekend. It started yesterday when I discovered that Chris Messina and Tara Hunt were on the same flight to Boston, and culminated at dinner with Greg Elin (whom I first met at the FLOSS Usability Sprint, and who invited me to join him for dinner), Daniel Perry (a lawyer who’s been an important contributor to recent Identity Commons discussions), Tom Munnecke (first introduced to me by Jack Park when I was just starting Blue Oxen Associates), and Doc Searls (who needs no introduction). Also at the dinner: Ellen Miller, Micah Sifry, David Isenberg, Britt Blaser, and Yochai Benkler. Quite a contrast from last year, when I was hanging with grassroots Wiki peeps every night. I’m not complaining, though. The conversation was fascinating, even if we didn’t talk much about Wikis.    (KWQ)

Keeping with this theme, I didn’t hear much about Wikis today, other than my interview with Ward Cunningham. I kept my questions pretty basic, as a lot of folks there had never heard him speak, but I managed to slip in a few probing questions for myself. I asked Ward about the evolution of Wiki culture, and I specifically mentioned the culture of anonymity that he strongly encouraged in the early days, but that seems mostly absent in today’s Wikis. Ward seemed resignedly ambivalent. I asked him about what makes a Wiki a Wiki, and he was decidedly agnostic in his response: anything that facilitates a permissive spirit and mode of collaboration. I’m not sure whether he was being political or whether he truly feels this way. My guess is a bit of both, but I’ll press him on this if I get a chance later this weekend.    (KWR)

I showed up late to Larry Lessig‘s keynote, but I was unconcerned, as I had heard him give his Free Culture speech before. It’s excellent, but he recycles it often. Sure enough, he was doing the same speech, and I started tuning out. Fortunately, my brain was paying partial attention, or I would have missed what may end up being the most intriguing development of the conference.    (KWS)

Larry started talking about the interoperability of licenses, and how it was silly that the FDL and Creative Commons BY-SA licenses could not be relicensed interchangeably, even though the two licenses were equivalent in spirit and intent. He then proposed an interoperability clause as well as a neutral organization whose purpose would be to classify equivalent licenses. His talk was followed by a really good panel discussion between him and Eben Moglen. This stuff is really complicated and important, but it looks like Larry and Eben are serious about working together towards a common solution. Apparently, Jimbo Wales deserves a lot of credit for getting these two to cooperate. Did I mention that I love this community?    (KWT)

Quick hits:    (KWU)

  • I shared a flight and T ride here with Chris Messina aned Tara Hunt. (Chris was presenting on Bar Camp.) Chris extolled the virtues of Voodoo Pad, which apparently has autolinking features a la my Markup Free Auto Linking Wiki idea.    (KWV)
  • Was excited to see two of my roommates from last year: Kurt Jansson, a German doctoral student and president of the German chapter of Wikimedia Foundation, and Juan David Ruiz, a Chilean lawyer.    (KWW)
  • Saw Erik Zachte in the morning, who does awesome Wikipedia work. Erik immediately told me about two cool projects I had never heard of: FON and Wikimapia.    (KWX)
  • Caught up with Rory O’Connor after my session with Ward. Rory’s a filmmaker who came to last year’s Wikimania to make a documentary on Wikipedia. What I didn’t know was that he was so inspired by the proceedings, he decided to release all 13 hours of his footage under a Creative Commons license to encourage folks to mix their own documentaries from the event. Check it out, and mix away! There’s some interview footage of me somewhere in there, and I make a cameo in Rory’s 11-minute rough cut, in the background of Jimbo’s interviews yukking it up with John Breslin.    (KWY)
  • Somehow, I got recruited by multiple Wikipedians to help with the lightning talks due to my process expertise. My expert advice: “Move those chairs into a circle, and be firm with the time limit.” Yes folks, this is why I get paid the big bucks.    (KWZ)
  • Briefly got a chance to chat with Tim Starling about the OpenID integration in Mediawiki. Tim explained that they’re going to unify the user databases across all the different Wikimedia properties. This was further validation that Yoke‘s identity proxy approach is useful. Of course, one of these days, I’m going to have to actually write down what that approach is, so that I can convince people of its utility.    (KX0)

Ward Cunningham at WikiMania

Just got back from a super intense, super productive 1Society retreat last week in Staunton, Virginia. Despite the photographic evidence to the contrary, we got a lot of stuff done. More on this later.    (KUX)

The next stop on my summer road show is Cambridge, Massachusetts for WikiMania 2006. It starts this Friday, August 4. (Hacking Days start tomorrow.) The program kicks serious butt this year, thanks to Samuel Klein and Phoebe Ayers‘ hard work.    (KUY)

This year, I get the pleasure of interviewing the man himself, Ward Cunningham, on stage. We’re scheduled for 10:45am this Friday, August 4, so please drop by and participate. If you have things you’d like me to ask Ward, you can add them to the session page.    (KUZ)

I have my fingers in a lot of pies, and I get to interact with a lot of great people as a result. But there are no gatherings I look forward to more than to Wiki gatherings. There are just so many great folks in this community. I’m especially looking forward to reconnecting with many of the great people from last year’s Wikimania. Can you tell I’m excited?    (KV0)

If you’re going to Wikimania this weekend, or if you’re in the area, drop me a line!    (KV1)