Migrating from one wiki software to another is a pain. A few years back I migrated the SVG wiki from OpenWiki to PhpWiki (and since then it’s been migrated again, to MediaWiki). This was, a lot of really boring copy-paste work. Then again, a year ago I migrated our internal wiki at work from MoinMoin to Confluence. Again, boring, tedious work. All of this because different implementations can’t agree on the basic syntax for marking up stuff like headers, tables and bold text. Common, how hard can it be. There are already some attempts for a common markup out there. Can’t you just agree on one?
I agree with Jason Sankey that standardizing on one-shall-rule-them-all wiki syntax would be great, can it be done? In the meantime, maybe one should write an any-to-any wiki syntax converter. By using a common syntax/object model one could easily plug in additional syntaxes as they (undoubtably) come along. Anyone know of such a project already?
tags: Standards