The Wikipedia - its mark-up language?

[tashirosgt]

Every now and then I think about contributing some comment to a Wikipedia aritcle. But when you start investigating how to do this, you are faced with learning what looks like some kind of mark-up language. For example, if you want to add a comment to the discussion of an article, it looks like you have to edit the source code of the discussion page. Does anyone know if the Wikipedia's methods are an implementation of some standard language? It might be worth learning if it was. I can't see investing the time otherwise.

[codergeek42]

Wiki Markup

[Jman]

Other wikis are use similar syntax, like Moin powering http://fedoraproject.org.

The various wiki styles, BBcode and others are a category of markup I think of as quick edit and post. Fairly straightforward. Just learn what you need. And there are usually plenty of examples in the source markup of other's work.

[tashirosgt]

I'm curious whether any has made tools for composing Wiki mark-up in a more natural way (Similar to the way that there are editors for html ) ? Is the Wiki mark-up popular because it is easy to compress? Or is it used because of some tradition that goes back to the earliest days of the web?

[a thing]

I don't get why they do this. They say so that everybody doesn't need to know XHTML, but then the people that do know it just have to learn a new markup language that gets converted to XHTML.

[Jman]

Tags or ASCII art, it's all structure.

From how wikipedia describes wiki supposedly wikis are simpler.

There are WYSISYG editors, notably embedded in browsers for blogs, etc. but those are mostly straight HTML as far as I know.

[Mat]

most wikis have a page which is meant to experiment with editiing (i.e. the markup).. usually they are called SandBox.

Wikipedia has one too, so go there and have fun
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox


Mat