2025-08-06 –, NAKURU
Language: English
Let's talk about wikitext, the markup language authors and editors use to express not just words for humans to read, but all sorts of information about the structure, processes, sources, taxonomy, organization and reliability of our work. What would you like to express, but find difficult? What would you change if you could? What rough edges and unexpected behaviors trip you up?
In this open discussion I will kick things off with a dozen different visions for wikitext, including syntax changes minor and major, new templating mechanisms, replacing wikitext entirely with markdown, not writing wikitext at all ever, annotations everywhere, and a language for page layout. Then you’ll contribute your own ideas and we’ll discuss together the pros and cons. At the end hopefully we’ll find a few pieces of gold among the pile of wild ideas!
This will be a discussion with the audience about wikitext ideas, wild and sane. I will start the conversation by introducing a dozen starter ideas, including:
- An alternate template system based on handlebars/mustache syntax and Extension:ArrayFunctions
- Versioning wikitext, so new features can be added without breaking old articles
- Grunge, a wildly simpler wikitext
- Markdown as a replacement for wikitext
- HTML as a replacement for wikitext (no wikitext, at all, ever!)
- Syntax tweaks: heredocs, ditching the colon in parser functions, transclusion syntax unification, backticks
- Abstract Wikipedia (another way not to write wikitext)
- Writing in all languages at the same time (LanguageConverter on steroids, cross-wiki parallel texts)
- Annotations everywhere!
- Composition grammars for fragments, transcluding non-wikitext structured data
- A page description language for articles, sidebars, and media
- Variable-length argument lists for templates
After presenting these lightning-talk style, the audience will be invited to (briefly & succinctly) contribute their own wild and crazy ideas for wikitext and article authoring/editing. We'll discuss them and try to improve our bad ideas and build consensus around our best ones.
- How does your session relate to the event theme: Wikimania@20: Inclusivity. Impact. Sustainability?
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This aim of this session is to brainstorm together about ideas with Impact. By enabling further innovation in the core technology we use to author and edit knowledge, we hope to build long-term sustainability.
- What is the experience level needed for the audience for your session?
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Some experience will be needed
- How do you plan to deliver this session? You will be asked to confirm this closer to the date in case of changes to the format.
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Onsite in Nairobi
- Should your session be selected for the program, do you agree to release your session and supporting materials on-wiki and on the eventyay platform under CC BY-SA 4.0?
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I agree
- What other themes or topics does your session fit into? Please choose from the list of tags below.
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Collaboration
C. Scott Ananian is an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, working on the Parsoid project. He also dabbles with LanguageConverter, and Real-time collaboration in VE.
Previously, Dr. Ananian was a jack-of-all-trades for the One Laptop per Child Foundation. He received his PhD in computer science from MIT, and before joining OLPC was a local activist and organizer for copyright issues. He's a kernel hacker, part-time khipu researcher, and aperiodic tesselation aficionado. Now he tries to build robust and reliable systems to allow everyone to discover, share, and learn.