What do you mean by "good"? A full-fledged office suite, e.g. Open or MS? Auto-completion when typing in names of articles in your wiki, or templates? As far as I can tell, Media Wiki was designed for relatively simple formatting. I admit I write in wiki-text, though I now tend to switch to FCKeditor (Version 1.0.1) to edit tables. It does a pretty good job, and allows you to go back & forth between wiki text & "rich editor" modes. * * ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Haim (Howard) Roman Computer Center, Jerusalem College of Technology Phone: 052-8-592-599 (6022 from within Machon Lev) On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 18:05, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 12:02 PM, Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] <sullivan(a)mail.nih.gov> wrote: Links sure are fancy! -Chad

Sorry for my poor English, which I have only been speaking for 55 years... The links I was referring to are image links, as in when you click on an image you are sent to a designated page or URL and not to the image's page, which is what happens when you click on a regular image. For example, a normal image is specified with [[Image:Picture.png]] and when you click on the image you are sent to the images page "Image:Picture.png". But you can designate a link for the image thusly [[Image:Picture.png|link=Main Page]]. Clicking on that image will send you to the Main Page, and [[Image:Picture.png|link=http://www.mediawiki.org]] will send you to the mediawiki.org website. Similarly you can add alt-text by specifying [[Image:Picture.png|alt=this is a picture]] which will provide the alt-text "this is a picture" when your mouse hovers over the image. The FCKeditor does not handle these image attributes, just size, position and caption, which was my only point about links, and yes, I consider it "fancy" since most users do not add these attributes to their images. If they did I would be getting a lot of complaints about using the FCKeditor wrt images. -Jim -----Original Message----- From: David Gerard [mailto:dgerard@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 2:01 PM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Least-worst present WYSIWYG solution? On 10 February 2011 17:02, Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] <sullivan(a)mail.nih.gov> wrote: Our organisation isn't government, but I'd say the typical user has comparable technical competency, i.e. they're good at their jobs, they want to share information, but they largely can't work computers. Is it that hard adding links in FCKeditor? I'd have thought that was a pretty basic function ... -d. _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

Yea, another annoying feature of the FCKeditor is it trying to make sense of what it does not understand, like some extension tags, leading it to mangle them, like replacing < and > with &gt and &lt. If your users are going to use an extension's features and FCKeditor is going to mangle them then this may be a real issue. I use the Inputbox but I tend to be the only one editing those pages and I normally use wikitext as my default editor. Still, overall, the FCKeditor is accepted pretty well here but we only add extensions to a wiki when a user requests it. Normally only Cite and FCKeditor are added, and FCKeditor understands and uses Cite. I've installed various Calendar extensions, Widgets, and CategoryTree with no complaints but that doesn't mean the users have run into all the possible problems. -Jim -----Original Message----- From: David Gerard [mailto:dgerard@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, February 10, 2011 2:35 PM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] Least-worst present WYSIWYG solution? On 10 February 2011 19:24, Sullivan, James (NIH/CIT) [C] &lt;sullivan(a)mail.nih.gov&gt; wrote: This is most promising :-D Yes, if they want to do fancy image attributes they can use wikitext :-) My last experiment with FCK was hampered by it messing up the tags used by Extension:InputBox - our users are very fond of the "Create an article!" box I put on the front page of our internal wikis, but ediitng the page in FCK mangles it. Has anyone else encountered this? Or even solved it? - d. _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

On 10 February 2011 23:28, Platonides &lt;Platonides(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Good idea! Though FCK kindly makes it impossible even to properly create the *template*. I had to comment it out in LocalSettings.php, create {{Create an article}} then uncomment it. Still, it's there now ... sort of a workaround :-) - d.