All The Tropes Wiki Project

[Labster]

If you need someone who can regex up some regular expressions to convert
all four of the link syntaxes into a standard fifth syntax, I'm all
over that.

Thanks for the offer, but unfortunately, your skill set overlaps with my own a lot.  It turns out if you consider all of the variations, there are more than 12 different cases you have to account for.  And doing so takes ~100 lines of code, because macros and links both use double-bracket syntax, and that needed to be disentangled.

I suppose this is just spiteful of me, but it would be nice if some
common markup element or three were different enough from PMWiki's
coding that it makes copying the new wiki's original content to TVT
annoying for the casual user...

Your wish is my command.  But not out of spite, but purely technical reasons.  The current markup proposal is:

• Links: ["Page Name"]  ["Fanfic/Work Name/Characters" with alternate text]
• Macros: [[AC:All Caps Text], [[note:*]this works like hottip[[/note]
• Spoilers: This sentence ends {{with spoilers!}}
• Images and tables: to be determined, but definitely different.
  

So really, only the links and spoilers and images on every page will break.  Since I have a script that converts from TVT to the new wiki code, it will be trivial to get something up convert one way.  Going the other way, back to TVT, will probably be a harder programming challenge than the one I just did.  If we have the right to migrate data to our site, it would be kind of unfair to try and block it from going to another site.  But I'm not going to code it

Oh yeah, and if there's something that any of you really hate about TVT wiki markup, now is the time to tell me.

Seconding "AllTheTropes"; one of my gripes about the existing TVTropes
site is that so much of it relies on in-jokes and prior knowledge -- the
classic one I keep mentioning to my roommate as bad design being the
Tomato In The Mirror trope, because the name of it in no way says what
it is -- and if it's up to me, even just as one vote, I'd like to
help nudge this wiki into sticking with clear names that state exactly
what they mean.  AllTheTropes does that most clearly out of the choices
listed, I think.

I think you and your roommate need to watch The Big O.  Then you'll get the "Tomato in the Mirror" thing.  Seriously though, sometimes I like the cultural shibboleth names, sometimes I don't.  However, language is so varied, I'm not sure if we can have a clear policy on page names that would meet the ideal of "fun name that everyone understands."
So far as the reversion/deletion question: There are two general philosophies about running a wiki.  You can either try to limit the vandalism that users can do, or you can give everyone the tools to repair vandalism.  I have a tendency to lean towards the latter approach, because it creates less social stratification.  TV Tropes has a problem with moderators that think that they're the vanguard that protects the wiki against the unwashed masses.  So I don't want to have to recreate those distinctions unless extensive vandalism makes it necessary to do so.  If a page is accidentally or maliciously deleted, with easy access to a revert button, it won't stay deleted for more than 5 minutes.  Still, I'm welcome to hearing arguments that controls on these functions are good and necessary.

But beyond that I'm hesitant to commit on. I don't want to promise an
ability to do X and only deliver 'something much less than X'.

That's exactly why I've been quiet about the project until now.
-- ∇×V