As I implement twiki some people are telling me that English is a more developed language than wiki. They say that it is wrong to change the format of the language to include WikiWords at all, much less to use those to define links. They also don't understand why dotted decimal numbers are no longer considered important. Such as A5.7 Liter engine or the ever-present House Bill 91.032 that will add a cost of 5 cents to every email sent.

Is it possible to include the NOAUTOLINKING tags in a template so that

[[...]]

are required to create a link?

I know that the Period and Shift keys were added to the keyboard to provide easy support for WikiWords but now some people want to use them for grammatical reasons.

When I try to explain the backward compatibility issues they think backward compatibility to a product that has been in use for several centuries (i.e. English) should take precedence. They had the idea that the period could be replaced by the words "of wikiweb" with the web name following instead of preceding the topic.

Are these changes so drastic as to warrant a new product just to accommodate the few English users out there?

-- TimHayward - 17 Oct 2002

The quickest solution is to add noautolink tags to the beginning and end of WebTopicEditTemplate on your site. Note that this will place the tags within the editable portion of the page so they could be removed by mistake. I tried putting the tags in $templates/view.tmpl as well but then they didn't work.

WRT to "xxx of web" instead of "Web.xxx", I personally think writing [[Wiki Vs English]] of Codev web would be more troublesome than it is worth. What would one do when referencing multiple other webs in the same paragraph? And how could it be implemented anyway? The "of web" part would need to be enclosed somehow, leading to awkward things like [[[Wiki Vs English][of Codev web]]].

• curlicues substituted for square brackets because the nop tag doesn't seem to escape double square brackets Well, it does, and (put the <nop> between the first and second [), put I'm struggling with fixing your triple curly bracket syntax -- maybe I should put it back the way it was?

I don't understand the sentence containing "the Period and Shift keys were added to the keyboard", could you elaborate?

WRT to being able to use periods in topic names: I too would prefer to be able to reference a topics like TwikiVersion3.0 instead of TwikiVersionThreeDotZero. I don't know how this would be possible without losing the Web. convention, which is very widely used.

-- MattWilkie - 17 Oct 2002

RE: of web/of wiki...

Does it have to be enclosed in something? Can't the phrase act as a symbol without including special characters? Such as in the example: [[English vs. Wiki of web Codev]]

I was thinking of the string "of wiki" (or maybe "of webzone") instead of "of web" because it is so unique that it doesn't run much of a chance of being included in other meaningful sentences.

RE: dotted decimal numbers...

I understand the desire to keep the web. for backwards compatibility and to keep from confusing the masses that have already become accustomed to that nomenclature, but there is a much wider potential audience that would like backward compatibility to English, since they have been using it for such a long time.

Use of web. means that we lose the dotted decimal number convention, which is older by a factor of hundreds and more widely used by a factor of millions. What justifies such change.

English is a powerful and flexible language that is understood by lots of people; people that have a great deal of information that belongs in wikiwebs. But if we tell them they cannot use English, but rather our bastardization of English they are likely to keep that information to themselves. In order to preserve a standard, which was poorly chosen and recognized by a very small segment of the population.

RE: the line about the shift key and period

Those comments were sarcastic and I should be very ashamed of myself. The period and the shift keys were actually around before WikiWords and were used for other purposes than what Wiki has chosen to use them for.

Summary

I guess in summary what I am saying is that the argument for backwards compatibility is not valid because backwards compatibility to English was thrown out the window in favor of cutesy concepts such as C format web.topic names and WikiWords. I am in favor of reversing that trend even at the expense of having to convert existing data to the new(old) format. Or at least having to option to go forward without being controlled by that one small error in judgment.

I apologize for being so adamant about this but I do face these arguments while trying to implement new technology and I don't have an answer that I believe in. The closest I can come to an explanation is that we geeks write the code and therefore we make the rules. To hell with what the rest of the world has been doing for the past 200 years.

---

And as I read my rants I realize I am expecting a revolutionary change, not an evolutionary one. Therefore it is time for me to get out the coding fork. But Wiki and Twiki did provide amazing proof that, given the oppurtunity, people will share what they know.

TimHayward - 17 Oct 2002

I would add my 2 cents:

• Most of the users I know are not english. I am French, and we have meetings in english when nobody in the room is english (italian, dutch, deutch...), in a "pidgin" english that would make your users cringe. There are two "english" now: the Academic Language, and the "Esperanto", with all its evolution (I wonder how they consider smileys
• WikiWords are not english. They are akin to the keywords of programming languages. As you are English-speaking you dont realize this, but in France or in Spain (Catalogne especially) there are regularily maniacs which try to impose programming languages with keywords in French ("si" "alors" "sinon" instead of "if" "then" "else" for instance), or even Operating systems! (The "SOL" systeme was a clone of unix with every command translated to french!).

Basically tell them that TWiki syntax is a kind of programming language "marking up" the english text. Let them use the ... & <nop> constructs...

-- ColasNahaboo - 18 Oct 2002

_(please notice that the remarks presented above did not reflect the true intent of the author, and he is a programmer. It appears he meant to say (in the last line of his comments) "opening-square-bracket-square-bracket, ellipsis, closing-square-bracket-square-bracket" and instead he unintentionally said "ellipsis"). _

It seems arrogant to me to tell statesmen, surgeons, biologists, comedians, etc. that we will "let them" learn to program and toss out the millions of man-years of evolution of the languages (as you pointed out this goes far beyond just English).

I really have no problem with the double square bracket construct. However, I do think we should be able to globally turn off the automatic creation of WikiWords for words with embedded capital letters (such as SunOS or HomeVestors) as these represented personal pronouns long before we chose to make them WikiWords.

I think a much bigger issue is the one of dotted decimal. I don't know a workaround for it that does not involve the user. Here we are not just saying we will "let you" learn to program, but also, we forbid you to write in the style that has become universally accepted.

In the case of the markup portion of twiki we must ask for their help because we have so far failed to implement a WYSIWYG textarea. That is not the case for WikiWords or dotted decimal.

_ my newest bumper sticker: _

IF USERS MUST PROGRAM TO USE TWIKI THEN ONLY PROGRAMMERS WILL USE TWIKI

TimHayward - Eighteenth of October Thirty Three Years After Man First Landed On The Moon

Tried fixing up your curlycues (note above). Just for the record, I also would like a TWiki without WikiWords -- supporting topic names with spaces, ".'s and other punctuation. Don't think I can help anytime soon, but would love to see somebody tackle this. I'd recommend creating an option within TWiki rather than a total fork in hopes of taking advantage of all (most?) future TWiki developments with minimal effort.

-- RandyKramer - 19 Oct 2002

Parts of the above discussion should be more properly labelled: "Computers vs Human Language". Using natural language is a dream as old as computers. A pipe dream so far. Don't expect a few thousand lines of perl to solve this...

But I agree with the bumper sticker: minimize the number of <nop>, %THIS% %AND{"THAT"}% constructs. Each one needed by a text author will decrease usage by 50% (probably too optimistic guess).

And with respect to the linking capabilities: this could be definitely improved. The way [[bracket linking]] currently works, is confusing and too restrictive; e.g. intersite links break. And decimal dots are really really needed. Forcing s.th. like [[Version1Dot0][version 1.0]] is not nice, not user friendly.

It shouldn't be too hard to map [[Almost any(!) 1.0 thing ... ]] into a TWiki-compliant filename, i.e. title. For '.' and ':' to work, they must be context sensitive. First try the left-hand side as web (or intersite link alias), then assume it is a page in the local web. This should should turn [[version 1.0]] into a link to Version1-0.

-- PeterKlausner 21.10.02 (isn't it kewl to mix conventions ;-)

A lot of this comes down to having an EasyEditor - tools such as Word use a highly complex internal data structure but can hide it through a WYSIWYG user interface. TWiki 'just' needs to do the same thing and then the whole Wiki vs English tension is removed.

-- RichardDonkin - 21 Oct 2002

Tim, I understand the sentiments. However, TWiki syntax isn't English. (Indeed you aren't ) American isn't English. Dialects emerge because they are useful to the community they serve in one way or another.

TWiki syntax is NOT a dialect of English. TWiki syntax applied to English is a dialect of english, TWiki syntax applied to French is a dialect of French, etc. For reference, most English people are shocked at the way Americans use the language, and we've been using it here for a little longer than you (eg "3 liters/meter, gray colored aluminum tunneling" is disgustingly bad English

TWiki syntax is an extended syntax that is designed to be applied to any any language. There is another syntax like this - HTML. TWiki syntax would work badly on a language like Japanese, and works better on a language like English.

TWiki syntax is a markup language. What does this mean? It adds structure to an ambigious language. For example, most English people would recognise Terry Wogan Radio 2 as potentially a wiki word of "Terry Wogan Radio 2", others would expect it to be two wiki words - eg "Terry Wogan" "Radio 2". How do you tell the system which you want - if either ? After all it may just be like above - in the context of a phrase, rather than something that needs extra referral. A human reader may be able to tell, and the reason is simple English is "designed" to be understood by a Human reader, who can deal with the ambiguity inherent in human languages.

To you of course, I'd expect you to not even expect Terry Wogan Radio 2 to be Wiki Words!

TWiki syntax is designed to be "low impact" on English, but isn't perfect. As RichardDonkin says, a better editor for non-technical people IS needed. Please feel free to write one that converts Twiki markup into something more friendly to non-technical!

If you don't get the humour (or "humor", ick) above, apologies!

Oh, and what's wrong with only Programmers using TWiki? If it's useful they will. For the record though I know of Sales teams, legal guys, and large swathes on non-programmers using Twiki - they just have been told upfront why the syntax is the way it is - Computers Suck At Natural Language!

-- TWikiGuest - 22 Oct 2002

I think this discussion needs a link to UnderscoreWikiWords

(p.s. I really hate WikiWords, myself, personally. I'm a programmer; I write happily with HTML or Perl. I also write English.)

-- VickiBrown - 16 Nov 2004

When I see phrases like "As I implement twiki some people are telling me that English is a more developed language than wiki" I think of COBOL, I think of my work as a technical writer and now as an auditor reading what people think is technical writing (I'm a bit of a language maven and curmedgeon) and my reaction is to say "Your point being ...?"

That english is a more developed language is great, but we still program in C and perl. So what? Tools for the job. Plenty of non programmers use things that have constrained grammers and are "not english". They type numeric passcodes into banking machines; read non grammatical signs on store-fronts and in airports. They fill out forms with instructions which, technically speaking, are ambigious, and fill them out with what one has to stretch one's imagination to regard as good english. So what? Most people who do speak and write English don't have any formal training in English grammar and syntax. The wonder of the language is that we still get by. We even understand politicians when they verbify nouns and ommit real verb from their speeches. (OK, so that's our problem, best fixed by not electing them in the first place...)

-- AntonAylward - 17 Nov 2004

wow i finally fixed a spelling mistake

personally, i'd like us to examine an idea that TravisBarker kept mentioning - phrase and word based linking. (ok, some of it is my take on his idea ).

1. some javascript on a TopicView that allows the user to hightlight some text, hit the magic button, and a new topic gets created.
2. the rendering engine needs to be reversed, right now it parses the text for possible TopicNames, and then locks to see if those topics exist, to support this idea, we would need to know what Topics exist, or are in the set to be linked (a way of implementing NestedWebs without needing to be actual nested directories) and then searching for those in the topic to be rendered

-- SvenDowideit - 17 Nov 2004