[e-lang] Convert Walnut to MediaWiki

[James Graves]

Mark S. Miller wrote:

> 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.

You understand what's going on.

If the tools don't currently have the capability of dumping an entire
tree as one unit, then it should be straight-forward to add it.  All the
information is there.

> 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?

It's kind of funny.  Originally, there wasn't really any wiki markup.
You just had text, and anything with CamelCase got automatically made
into a link.

I wouldn't say that wiki markup encodes more structure than HTML.  It
really just makes the easy things easy.  Using a blank line to indicate
a paragraph, for example.

> 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.

Well, as far as collaboratively editing goes, I think a wiki is a very
good choice.

Another option is to use Google's browser-based word processor.  All
changes made by any user are seen by all in real-time.  

For converting a wiki into a paper book, I don't know how easy that
would be.  I think someone will have to add in a lot of formatting that
can't be expressed in the wiki version.

I, personally, would rather read an on-line version, because it will be
the most up-to-date.  But many, many people I know still have a fondness
for paper.  There are multiple issues here, mostly psychological and
ergonomic (screen vs. paper).

James