On 13/10/2007, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 10/13/07, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
http://www.calacanis.com/2007/02/20/technological-obscurification-three-ways...
His name is Calacanis,
And it's right there in the URL. I suppose this is what I get for including a vocabulary flame.
and it's an old thread - but IMHO quite relevant to the discussion about slowing growth.
Yes, which is why I forwarded it.
Good WYSIWYG in a wiki is hard; even Wikia hasn't solved that particular problem yet. Hopefully we'll make serious progress on it next year. The LiquidThreads discussion extension which could replace talk pages is now in production use e.g. on WikiEducator.org ; all it needs is a champion within the Wikimedia community.
Really? That's excellent :-)
The comment I added to the discussion was:
=== 1. The main problem is that MediaWiki wikitext does not have a defined syntax - the definition is quite literally the PHP code - and is mathematically impossible to put into EBNF. (Many have tried, got to 95% and realised it wasn't actually possible.) So there are no alternate parsers, and no WYSIWYG can cover the lot. But 95% coverage in a WYSIWYG editor should get most of the useful bits.
FCKeditor looks like the best prospect for a WYSIWYG MediaWiki editor at present. It's not there yet, but I hold out hope for the near to medium future.
2. Talk pages are indeed a crappy forum format. There are various extensions to help improve this - Uncyclopedia uses the forum extension to good effect (wikitext pages but with a forumlike main page) and the LiquidThreads extension is undergoing serious work.
3. On this one, I think you're plain wrong. (a) IRC is damn useful, but you do not in any way have to be on IRC to be a productive Wikipedia editor, admin or even arbitrator. And many aren't and won't be. (b) I find it hard to conceive how any Internet idiot can lower the world's collective IQ with instant messaging, but thinking people who would want to contribute to an encyclopedia can't. And IRC is IM based around chatrooms instead of one-to-one. If you can use Trillian or GAIM/Pidgin, you can use IRC. ===
- d.