About CREOLE Files
Creole Markup
Creole is a standardized wiki markup language intended to be a common baseline across different wiki engines. It defines a core set of formatting rules that all compliant wikis should support, reducing the learning curve when switching between wiki platforms.
Family
Documents & Text
Extension
.creole
MIME Type
text/x-creole
Can Use As
HOW CREOLE
CAME TO BE.
Wiki Creole — .creole — was an ambitious 2007 attempt to create a common wiki syntax every wiki engine could agree on. The design group included developers from MediaWiki, MoinMoin, DokuWiki, and TiddlyWiki who drafted a shared markup with `**bold**`, `//italic//`, `[[links]]`, and `{{images}}`. Creole 1.0 shipped in 2007 with formal specification.
Unfortunately, no major wiki engine adopted Creole as its primary syntax. MediaWiki stayed with its own, DokuWiki kept DokuWiki markup, TiddlyWiki went its own way. Creole survives as an optional parser in a few smaller wiki engines and as historical evidence of why unification-from-above rarely works in markup languages.
CURIOSITIES &
TRIVIA.
Wiki Creole was designed by representatives from 5 major wiki engines — a rare inter-project cooperation.
Despite formal standardization, no major wiki adopted Creole as its primary syntax.
The Creole spec explicitly aimed to avoid the "each wiki's syntax is different" pain for users.
TiddlyWiki, XWiki, and a few smaller engines offer Creole as an optional import format.
Creole is a cautionary tale of markup standardization — "one syntax to rule them all" doesn't work when existing projects have installed bases.
STRENGTHS &
LIMITATIONS.
Strengths
- Cross-wiki interop goal.
- Simple syntax.
- Formally specified.
Limitations
- Nobody adopted it as primary.
- Tiny ecosystem.
- Zero momentum in 2026.
Typical Sizes & Weights
Wiki page source
2-20 KB
Technical Specifications
- MIME type
- text/x-creole
- Extension
- .creole
- Standard
- Wiki Creole 1.0 (2007)
- Status
- Historical
CONVERT FROM
CREOLE
Common Use Cases
Cross-wiki compatibility, standardized wiki authoring, wiki migration
Related Formats
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Frequently Asked Questions about CREOLE
Frequently Asked Questions
CREOLE (Creole Markup) is a document format used to store paginated text, with optional formatting, tables, images, hyperlinks, headers and footers. It sits in the documents & text family and is typically associated with a specific office suite or publishing pipeline that defined the format and ships the canonical reader.
Modern office suites — Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer, Apple Pages — open most CREOLE files with reasonable fidelity. If your installed software does not support CREOLE, convert to DOCX or PDF first using KaijuConverter; both open in virtually every reader, including free online viewers.
Upload the CREOLE to KaijuConverter and pick DOCX, PDF, ODT, RTF, HTML, Markdown, or plain text. Our pipeline runs LibreOffice headlessly plus pandoc for text formats — the same engines behind professional document pipelines. Styles, tables, images, and hyperlinks survive the conversion intact.
Yes, to a high degree. Standard fonts, headings, lists, tables, images, hyperlinks and page structure transfer cleanly. Custom fonts substitute to the closest match if not embedded; obscure layout features unique to CREOLE (frames, legacy macros) may flatten to static content in the target format.