Which Wiki text syntax or Markdown to use? [closed]

Question

Working on my personal knowledge base... I want to format my documents, even on local hard disk in wiki syntax. Sometimes I would upload them to a (corporate) wiki, sometimes I would download them from there. Planned are some tools to support this flow and searching my knowledge base (documents) for later. Obviously I want the markdown to be compatible with most, minimising conversion work.

So my question is similar to this related question, but

• What wiki text version or Markdown (dialect) should I use when I start something new? (i.e. documentation project and kind of wiki).
• What are the most wiedely used/recognized ones?
• And where is tool support (editors and or libraries) best? Concerned prog. languages are Java, Ruby, Scala.

Octans

We really need a Wiki standard that finally unifies them all: xkcd.com/927 – Astrophysics

Answer 1

Wikipedia says that there is no commonly accepted standard wikitext language.

Creole is one effort for a "common wiki markup language to be used across different Wikis". There is a version 1.0 of the specification and several wikis and wiki engines implement it. MediaWiki does not implement it.

Markdown has a large number of implementations and seems to be used quite a lot.

As there is no agreed standard, the language might be selected depending on features and available implementations depending on the use case.

Octans

Answer 2

(1) While there are a lot of wiki markups I suggest to stick to well defined markup language.

There are only 3 plain text markup with well defined specs:

• CommonMark attempt to define strong syntax and standardize common extensions of popular MarkDown. All love it. Very HTML oriented.
• reStructuredText is consistent framework for markup and well established project (started from 2001!!). If you need extensibility built into core specs, inline foreign markups, generate HTML/PDF/docbook/etc it is your choice. Several books and many software project was documented via reStructuredText. Check https://readthedocs.org/ With Sphinx publishing software you ever can build HTML with off-line JS search!!
• AsciiDoc is competitive to reStructuredText but lack of build-in extensibility. It is very DocBook oriented. Several books was written in AsciiDoc.

Textile markup didn't gain well defined specs and has weak community around. I recommend consider above 3 options instead.

(2) You definitely should stick to plain text files.

Support software for all above formats able to produce high quality output for printing and on-line publishing.

I stick to RST because I need extendibility and ability to inline foreign markup (math with LaTeX, graph with graphviz/dot, plotting with imagemagic, etc)

I search over personal tips inside Emacs editor or inside bash/grep. For advertising purpose I publish my tips online, for example: http://tips.defun.work/

Kaila

Answer 3

Unfortunately there is very little format standardization in the wiki world, although some wikis (notably Atlassian's Confluence, a commercial product) are moving towards XHTML.

The most widely used Wiki software is MediaWiki (of Wikipedia fame). Mediawiki's markup is famously hard to parse, but it has been around and used widely enough that there are lots of existing tools for converting both to and from MediaWiki format, as well as editing content with lots of different online and offline editors.

MediaWiki also has a full-featured API with lots of client libraries in various programming languages (see Client code), including eg. MediaWiki::Gateway for Ruby.

Tombouctou

So for a new project, that uses Wiki syntax for e.g. templating or content, would you recomment MediaWiki format? – Octans

Just how big is your project, and are you sure you need a wiki in the first place? For most low-tech projects, something like Google Docs with change tracking turned on will actually do a much better job. – Tombouctou

I want to save documents into some std format, machine readable would be nice, but still plain text and very readable in text editor for the user. This is markdown then (i.e. wiki syntax). Should be the base for some knowledge management tool (in development). – Octans