I wanted to comment on an interview on wikimedia foundation but found that I need an invitation to be able to edit the discussion wiki and add my comment!! So I decided to post it here.

The man who invented the Wiki (Ward Cunningham) can not see that its much more important to have a standard wiki-markup or structured text for all wikis before having WYSIWG tools for them. And that such WYSIWYG tool, and many other wonderful tools, need a standard format to work on.

It is very strange that he did not create an organization/body/foundation to help in promoting interoperability, despite his use of "about a dozen wikis". He can't see that today, each and every wiki programmer is desiging his own structured text / wiki-markup implementation for his own wiki. Leaving users locked with one wiki and can not freely migrate between them. Instead every wiki programmer is writing his own implementation of the same thing in a mediocre redudancy.

On the other hand the man who invented the Web (Tim Berners-Lee) founded the w3c in October 1994 to lead the technical revolution. And founded the principles to which allow interoperability, accomodate future technologies and decentralization. Through creating standards that allow the web to communicate with itself.

Anyways, it seems that Cunningham decided to leave it open like a wiki page for the users and developers to decide if they would colaborate on a standard. Or may be wikis are hyped about anyways and they are just tools like any text editor and not a revolutionary platform like the web.