I wish I could say I had something to do with the planning of this: part of Balisage 2010 is a contest to “encourage markup experts to review and to research the current state of wiki markup languages and to generate a proposal that serves to de-babelize the current state of affairs for the long haul.” To enter, you must propose a set of concrete steps (organizational, social, and/or technological) that will enable wiki content interchange, a real WYSIWYG editor, and/or wiki syntax standardization.
This pushes all of my buttons. It’s got structured documents, Web, parser geekery, writing, engineering, and standards. There’s a bunch of open source prior art, including PyXMLWiki, which I adapted from some fantastic earlier work from Rick Jelliffe.
Sadly, MarkLogic employees aren’t eligible to enter. Get your write-up done by July 15 and sent to balisage-2010-contest at marklogic dot com. The winner will be announced at Balisage and will take home some serious prize winnings, and also will be strongly encouraged (but not required) to give a brief summary (~10 minutes) of their winning entry.
Can’t wait to see what comes out of this. -m
