[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[George Herbert]

On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 4:42 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22 December 2010 12:29, wiki <doc.wikipedia at ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>> 1) WYSIWYG would be fantastic, but I've no idea what that would meet in
>> practice.
>
>
> It's been desperately wanted for years and is no closer now than it ever was.


I am not 100% convinced of this, but my current overwhelming
inclination is to state that WYSIWYG is incompatible with existing
MediaWiki markup, and therefore requires a Flag Day conversion to a
new encoding scheme which is less compact but also unambiguous and
properly specified from the beginning.

Which may not be community practical, given how much people invested
in existing markup customization to get little graphics benefits now.

On the other hand, that question has never been presented as such to
the community in general and the markup coder wizards who did a lot of
the complex templates and such in particular.  It might be worth the
Foundation and CTO taking a run at discussing it with the community
writ large.

So the question is, is lack of WYSIWIG in the mid to long term a
painful enough problem to justify the short to mid term disruptions
that converting away from Wikitext would require?  I don't know the
answer to that.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com