"As quoted by Thomas Dalton "
I totally agree with your point of view !
A Wiki's main purpose should be to publish and edit content just off the
fly.
Editors are only concerned with the content they are going to publish,
they should not be concentrating on the syntax as how the content should be
published !
MediaWiki, though promising, lacks one of the most important modules, the
WYSIWYG !
I hope the development team comes forward with integrating some of existing
rich text editors (e.g FCKEditor).
By the way, i checked WetPaint, it seems to be a community maintained Wiki.
I could not see how i could download the wiki software !
I am looking for a wiki to support my organization's internal usage.
--
Regards
Umair Imam
On 7/23/07, Sheldon Rampton <sheldon(a)prwatch.org> wrote:
Thomas Dalton wrote:
While there have been lots of suggestions for
WYSIWYG, it is very
difficult to implement with the current syntax (for technical reasons
I don't fully understand). The MediaWiki syntax isn't that difficult
to learn, however. You don't even need to use it at all, you can just
type in plain text. If you want simple formatting (headers, bold,
italic), it's quite easy. Things like tables and templates are much
more complicated, but there is no need to use them for most content.
With all due respect, saying that MediaWiki syntax "isn't that
difficult to learn" is just like saying that HTML or Wordperfect's
old markup language "isn't that difficult to learn." The worlds of
word processing and desktop publishing have gone to WYSIWYG for a
reason: It really *is* easy to learn, and nothing else really matches
it.
MediaWiki syntax is better than CamelCase and may be marginally
easier to learn initially than HTML, but once you get past beginner-
level editing, there's nothing easy about syntax like {{info |
param1=foo | param2=bar}}. For that matter, I don't see how
'''this''' or ''this'' is any easier to
understand than <b>this</b>
or <i>this</i>. The HTML version is a few more keystrokes, but it's
actually easier to guess that <b> means bold than it is to guess that
''' means bold, and '' for italic is easily mistaken for a quotation
mark.
I think MediaWiki's supposed ease of use is mostly a convenient
excuse for complacency and a way of avoiding dealing with the mess
that the parser has become. I predict that eventually someone will
develop a WYSIWYG wiki platform that does everything MediaWiki can
do, and once that happens, even Wikipedia will have to follow suit to
stay relevant. Its big advantage right now is that it has great
<i>content</i>, not that it is particularly easy to edit.
Umair Imam wrote:
And the only problem is that i have to be bound
to a WYSIWYG based
wiki.
Is there any other wiki which is as stable and simple as Media Wiki ?
You might want to try Wetpaint, which offers free WYIWYG wiki hosting:
http://www.wetpaint.com/
I tried them out awhile ago and thought they looked pretty good
overall. They weren't a good fit for my needs. (I'm sticking with
MediaWiki for now.) However, someone else might find them easier to use.
--------------------------------
| Sheldon Rampton
| Research director, Center for Media & Democracy (
www.prwatch.org)
| Author of books including:
| Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sister Cities
| Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
| Mad Cow USA
| Trust Us, We're Experts
| Weapons of Mass Deception
| Banana Republicans
| The Best War Ever
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