User:Realgeek

Push for Convergence
To say that I like wikis would be somewhat of an understatement. I don't so much love wikis as I have a great respect for and belief in their potential for knowledge distribution. That's why lately I've been, shall we say, bummed out about the spectacular diversity of Wikitext between different wiki engines.

After scrounging through the scraps of wildly varying tips and pseudo-techniques for wikitext conversion found on several google, freshmeat, sourceforge and cpan searches, I've come to the conclusion that no one else out there on the intarweb highway wants to write their own wikitext converter either. That's not entirely true; there are many places where someone can go to convert XML, docbook, sgml, html, whatever to one particular wikitext format. They're usually found on the sites of the wikitext-parsing engine in question. Various and sundry other options are available to convert one dialect of wikitext to aforementioned docbook, xyzml, etc.

The bottom line is that there is no universal converter, and it's probably too much trouble to DIY for anyone interested. Consider that once they realize that not only differences in the wikitext, but also how the different engines parse the wikitext make it veritably impossible to make a universal tool.

This is why I'm excited, nay, jazzed about Creole. There are smarter people than I at work on this project who aim to create a wikitext standard format that every wiki engine should support. I want to share my enthusiasm about this project with others and to make the bold statement that Creole will be the lingua franca of all wikis. Amen.