Two thoughts:
While the editing difficulty of wiki as it is does weed out the less motivated, in my particular nook of the Internet (cutting edge energy tech), it is weeding far more than I would like. People might be brilliant in science, but often are not so brilliant in word composition. I hope to make it as easy as possible for them.
I can see that the sheer number of HTML/Wiki code possibilities used in mediawiki would make the WYSIWYG task nearly impossible if one wanted to be able to enable all possible formatting options. So the "price" one will pay in going with a WYSIWYG editor would be a narrowing of formatting options.
In my case, that is a price that I would be willing to pay because I want to make it easy for those brilliant scientists who barely know how to spell.
Sterling D. Allan http://peswiki.com
p.s. thanks for the input
----- Original Message ----- From: "Jan Steinman" Jan@Bytesmiths.com To: "MediaWiki announcements and site admin list" mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 11:19 AM Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] what-you-see-is-what-you-get edit program?
I would not go quite so far as Paul, but I think there are better places to put resources than WYSIWYG editing.
The beauty of Wiki is it is collaborative. Some people have ideas they don't articulate well. Some people are expert wordsmiths, but don't necessarily have ideas. Some people are editors and copyreaders. Some people delight in formatting arcana.
The downside of WYSIWYG is Bad Design. Now everyone with a pirated copy of Word is a publisher -- NOT!
I've been through various flavors of roff, TeX, Merganthalier and Quikset typesetting codes, HTML, and many others. I think the beauty of formatting code is it makes you think. Because of the "high entry fee" (aka "dumbass tax"), you spend a bit more time figuring out how things are going to go together, and it shows in the results.
That's one of the reasons I Don't Do Word. Most Word docs are atrocious, with multiple spaces used for indentation and multiple line feeds used for vertical spacing. Someone sends me a Word document, and by the time my translators get through with it, it needs to be re-formatted anyway. I avoid hurting anyone's feelings that I re-formatted their "masterpiece" by explaining that I don't have Word, and my translation software "must have messed it up." :-)
It's not that WYSIWYG doesn't have a place. But let's just keep it there, okay?