User:Cscott/Ideas/A Dozen Visions for Wikitext

Talk idea: a dozen possible "wikitext 2.0" proposals, a dozen different ways future wikitext and templates might look. Maybe a panel discussion -- here are a starter dozen, bring your own!


 * 1) ArrayFunctions, etc: what a templating system based on handlebars/mustache/array functions might look like
 * 2) Versioning: a clause at the top of the article that would let you opt-in to new features, like "backtick for  "
 * 3) Grunge, a wildly simpler wikitext
 * 4) Heredocs
 * 5) Ditching the colon in parser functions / parser function & magic variable unification
 * 6) Markdown!  (Real question is: what would the transclusion syntax look like?)
 * 7) HTML (wikitext is dead, long live the MediaWiki DOM Spec and Visual Editor)
 * 8) Abstract Wikipedia (let's not write at all! / how does one "write" in a language-independent way?)
 * 9) Language Converter on steroids -> writing in all languages at the same time.
 * 10) Annotations everywhere
 * 11) A composition grammar for transclusions / a world of fragments
 * 12) PageMaker?  More explicit control of the different elements of the article, with different languages (potentially) for each.