Changes In Twenty Twenty

last modified: February 27, 2020

Preamble

How about everyone gets over it, learn to use wiki as it is, and quit trying to fix and improve everything. It's worked fine for many years and doesn't need fixing. Do you know how tiring it is watching every person come in here thinking they can fix it, or improve it, well guess what, you can't, if you could, this would be your wiki.

In response to the above paragraph, I must concur that we should stop all forms of innovation and advancement. They are utterly ridiculous and who are we to think we can make the world a better place? Sarcasm. It is this type of inventiveness that created WikiWiki in the first place. Who is WardCunningham to think he can make something easier to collaborate with than coding with plain HTML and uploading our changes to free-for-all FTP server. :-)

-- Wiki on SixSingleQuotes

I made post once asking about the remodeling of WikiWikiWeb, mispleased with progress, I gave it a shot myself.

Hopefully converting to markdown will make progress towards visualizing the wiki once and for all, and possibly get an aggregate on participation trends based on authors in the various topics and wikipages. That would be neat I think.

The Process

The conversion process looks like this wikimarkup > wikiscript html* > pandoc* > markdown

Where:

Modifications were done using replacements and regexes, usually passing it transforming function.

It could be an idea to write a parser for the wiki markup (which I initially tried), I do feel this is a practical idea given that I am only transforming the former output and exploiting the parser. Writing my own grammar and specification could result in a different set of unexpected features, such as the six single quotes bug---this is hard to validate across 36 000 pages.

It likely, and I suspect as much, that I have missed a great deal. Still I think this approach wins in comparison because side-effects are more managable when they are introduced on a one-by-one basis. Once erronous output is discovered, it has so far been easy to remove them.

I do welcome any constructive suggestions on this however, possibly a hybrid approach is reasonable at the 8-space to 4-space indentation step given the regular nature of regexes. What I mean by this is that the transformation assumes that lists cannot occur inside code blocks, and a guarantee of behaviour is impossible without the context, which regexes are unable to get.

changelog.md

Suggested Pages

Lastly, for anyone who got this far I want to recommend some pages:

New Users and Wiki Etiquette

Interesting Pages

-- /u/kluvin | MartinKleiven


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