Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist <at> gmail.com> writes:
Wikitext is not easy to edit.
It is easy enough to edit for power users, who make the large majority of edits;
and way more comfortable than WYSIWYG. Wikis require a certain hacker mentality
- not in the technical sense, but a desire to understand things in depth. It
takes effort to learn the syntax, but once you did, it gives you freedom and
effectiveness, because you are actually in control of things (as opposed to rich
text editors which sometimes do something similar to what you intended, at other
times not even close, because they use some fucked-up internal representation
that you have no way of knowing or understanding). This might be a problem for
Wikia with its fanboi target demographic that has the attention span of a Naruto
episode, but Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and writing a good encyclopedia
article requires hacker mentality in the first place, so whatever.
And then there is the ecosystem of bots, gadgets and other third-party tools
which is based on wikitext, and not only would moving away from wikitext a huge
maintenance burden, but again it would be replaced with something that is way
less intuitive and actually harder to use (simple text operations are somewhat
easier than fooling around with document trees).
So if you can do WYSIWYG on top of wikitext, cool (the learning curve is
certainly steep for new users, and that will only become worse as new features
are added). If you can do a sort of WYSIWYM with syntax highlighting,
context-sensitive help and wizards for the more inconvenient elements like
templates, that is even better, because it wouldn't create a gap between people
using WYSIWYG and wikitext, and would allow for a gradual learning experience.
But replacing wikitext with some sort of internal representation that is
unreadable for humans would be a huge mistake IMO.