A WYSIWYG option for wiki-editing would be just wonderful. In fact, since one of the problems with this is finding a tool that works in all browsers, simply offering options for what the user's edit-area looks like, would be a good place to start.
Evan makes some great points:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG
<
* If you use an in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor... you've got to create an HTML-to-Wikitext converter.
It might be possible to just make it a wikitext editor, and run a Wikitext-to-HTML converter for displaying it as you type. To get an idea of how much wiki-formatting there is to handle, see for instance Pilaf's preview-javascript: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Pilaf/livepreview.js
< customization to do. Links? Images? Templates? These are all
Checking to see if a link is red or not is hard. Images and templates don't have to be rendered immediately, but could be displayed more intuitively; i.e., * "<green><i>Template:my-text</i></green>" * "<green><b>Image:Mary figurine</b> (right-aligned, 200 pixels wide)</green> <blue><i>Luminescent figurine</i></blue>" rather than "{{my-text}}" or "[[Image:Mary figurine|right|200px|Luminescent figurine]]"
< * It will probably require some serious prioritization by
MediaWiki developers, and it's just not there.
Perhaps. It seems to me that someone could write an in-browser wiki editor which did a decent job of providing WYSIWYG for 90% of an editor's needs, without worrying about the parsing details for cutting-edge wiki syntax. Then you could make switching to that editor a preference which could be toggled from the edit page:
________________________________________ <h1> Editing PAGENAME </h1>
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[ ] Show edit toolbar | Edit tool: [ ] Walt's WYSIWYG editor [ ] Default wiki editor ________________________________________
* There are few other public systems using in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editors (I think Wacko Wiki is the only major Wiki engine doing it, for example), so there's not a lot of pressure to get it working.
Don't forget about Web's Biggest. Their site may be slooooow, but they at least have a "major" sense of self-worth. http://dirs.org/dir-wiki.cfm?cat=Wikipedia_1&tab=edit