[e-lang] Convert Walnut to MediaWiki

[Mark S. Miller]

Martin Scheffler wrote:
> http://www2.deltamobile.com/wiki/index.php/Walnut
> 
> OK, I've split by sections now. Should I split these pages further down?

I think so.

> Some of the pages are gigantic. I built the pages as subpages to Walnut/.
> Maybe I should extract the sub-sections as top level wiki pages?

I'm not sure I understand the subpage idea and how it relates to other wiki 
structuring ideas. If subpages organize pages into a ordered hierarchy, then 
representing a book as a tree of subpages seems natural. If someone wants to 
print out a larger unit, is there some way to say: "Gather the tree of 
subpages rooted here"? Since the wiki Walnut will quickly become the 
definitive one, it would be good to have some such gathering functionality.

Wiki markup started in an attempt to define a simple markup which was easier 
to learn and use than html. Has this been lost? The mediawiki markup language 
can, obviously, be converted to html. Presumably, the reason it's not html is 
that it encodes more structure, for use by the wiki software, than is as 
easily encoded into html. Is this right?

Could the extra structure be useful for enabling conversion as well to LaTeX? 
(OSDoc <http://www.coyotos.org/docs/osdoc/osdoc.html> is another attempt at an 
html-like markup language with more structure, in order to enable conversion 
to both html and LaTeX.) If so, then it becomes very attractive to use our 
wiki to collaboratively edit material, like Walnut, that we intend to 
paper-publish.

-- 
Text by me above is hereby placed in the public domain

     Cheers,
     --MarkM