On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:08:38 -0700, Sterling D. Allan sterlingda@pureenergysystems.com wrote:
It seems to me that early on the development curve of wiki software made a choice (a bad one, in my opinion) to go the code direction rather than the WYSIWYG direction.
Well, *extremely* early on in the development of wiki software, the choice was made to favour *simplicity*. Ward Cunningham called it "wiki wiki", meaning quick, and that's what it was - a barebones structure, that "just worked", without too much fuss. To "go in the WYSIWYG direction" you have to first create some underlying machine-readable code [you have to store it somehow], and then make some kind of human graphical interface that produces that code. So if you're going for simplicity, human-oriented code is the way to go, because you can just dispense with the last step - it's not so much "going in the code direction" as "not going as far as the crossroads".
Simplicity also meant that there wasn't really much to learn - mostly, you were just typing text with the odd CamelCaseLinkPattern in. Plus, of course, it was never meant to be "for as wide as possible an audience" - it was a kind of collabourative notebook for those interested enough to take part, and most of the people who were involved spent more time using their wikis to discuss things than developing them to be flashy and user-friendly. So my guess is that for the first, slow, wave of wikis the syntax really wasn't that big a problem.
Bear in mind also that the original wiki dates all the way back to 1995, when the idea of a reliable in-browser WYSIWYG editor would probably have seemed like asking for the moon on a stick [1]. And, AIUI, MediaWiki is only 2-and-a-half steps removed from that original wiki, with a distinct feel of 'evolution' [2] so it's maybe not surprising that although people have started looking at the WYSIWYG end of things, it's tended to be in more "revolutionary" takes on the wiki concept.
That's not to say the time hasn't come to WYSIWYGify MediaWiki - although the limited JavaScript editting toolbar we now have demonstrates just how cleverly something has to work to be "idiot proof" (just look around for newbies inserting text like '''Bold text''' and [[example link]]...) - but I think the claim that a decision, bad or otherwise, was taken in the past is somewhat naive.
Notes: ===== [1] I couldn't resist referencing this: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/moon-on-stick.htm...
[2] I believe the progression goes: WikiWikiWeb --> UseModWiki (a "WikiClone"; the one WikiPedia started using) --> "Phase 2 Wikipedia" (UseMod rewritten in PHP with bells on) --> MediaWiki ("Phase 3")