James Sullivan wrote:
Well, yes and no. Early word processors were quite buggy, and they had to produce postscript to send to a laser printer...
Hmmm, the "early word processors" I remember were HARDWARE. I guess that makes me ancient. :-)
...but improvements were made and today we expect word processors to work flawlessly...
Well, yes... except they don't. :-) My wife's word processor (Word 2008 on the Mac) crashes almost daily. And even the most sophisticated word processors today lack advanced features for writers. Consider a simple search-and-replace that changes "MediaWiki" into "Wikimedia." What if you want replacement only if "MediaWiki" is in a level-1 heading? Or only when it's part of a URL?
I'm going off on a tangent, so I'll stop here. :-)
Anyway, I agree with your points in principle and definitely welcome improvements to ease-of-use. I just don't think they're going to come in the form of a fantastic WYSIWYG wiki editor, because the features that make MediaWiki great, as opposed to merely good (templates, parser functions, parent & child categories, etc.), seem incredibly difficult to support in WYSIWYG, and even harder to prevent novices from deleting by accident.
DanB