Paul asked me to post this again, this time as a new thread, rather than as a reply to a non-related thread. I've reposted my question along with the responses I've seen thus far:

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Can anyone tell me if there is already in existence an editor program that enables one to edit mediawiki pages in a "what you see is what you get" mode (editing for dummies)?

I have an associate who says he could build such a program quite easily. I'm thinking, if it's so easy why hasn't it been done; surely it has been done; if so, where?

Thanks

Sterling D. Allan Executive Director, PES Network Inc http://pureenergysystems.com http://freeenergynews.com http://peswiki.com http://pesn.com

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From: "Tony Linde" <tony{at}linde.me{dot}uk> To: "MediaWiki announcements and site admin list" mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2005 12:49 PM Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] what-you-see-is-what-you-get edit program?

Not sure if this helps: http://www.plog4u.org/index.php/Main_Page

Cheers, Tony.

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From: "Evan Prodromou" <evan{at}bad.dynu{dot}ca> To: "MediaWiki announcements and site admin list" mediawiki-l@Wikimedia.org Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2005 2:03 PM Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] what-you-see-is-what-you-get edit program?

This is a subject near and dear to my heart. There's a good discussion on meta.wikimedia.org:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG

Here'd be my guess why it hasn't been implemented yet:

* If you use an in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor (the best user experience, in my opinion), you've got to create an HTML-to-Wikitext converter. We keep changing the Wikitext format, so it's a moving target. * Also, for an in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor, there's tons of customization to do. Links? Images? Templates? These are all kind of hard. And you have to figure out how to block out unwanted HTML elements, like <span> and <div>. * There are too many cross-browser in-browser WYSIWYG HTML editor tools (Kupu, htmlArea, fckEditor, epoz, dot dot dot). Nobody's up for committing to one or the other. * If you use an out-of-browser editor (I think there's some other ideas for doing that), you have to figure out how to get your Wikitext in and out of the server, avoid edit conflicts, and deal with lots and lots and lots of platform issues. * The main developers of MediaWiki concentrate on the needs of Wikimedia, and most of their development effort goes into a) reducing load on their servers and b) putting in stricter security features. * It will probably require some serious prioritization by MediaWiki developers, and it's just not there. * It's a huge frickin' undertaking. Most features in MediaWiki are wedged-in 4-liners. * 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.

If your associate is really interested in helping out with this, it needs to be done. I think if we ever get around to making a development roadmap, WYSIWYG editing should be part of a 2.x system.

~Evan