On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 4:42 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 22 December 2010 12:29, wiki doc.wikipedia@ntlworld.com wrote:
- WYSIWYG would be fantastic, but I've no idea what that would meet in
practice.
It's been desperately wanted for years and is no closer now than it ever was.
I am not 100% convinced of this, but my current overwhelming inclination is to state that WYSIWYG is incompatible with existing MediaWiki markup, and therefore requires a Flag Day conversion to a new encoding scheme which is less compact but also unambiguous and properly specified from the beginning.
Which may not be community practical, given how much people invested in existing markup customization to get little graphics benefits now.
On the other hand, that question has never been presented as such to the community in general and the markup coder wizards who did a lot of the complex templates and such in particular. It might be worth the Foundation and CTO taking a run at discussing it with the community writ large.
So the question is, is lack of WYSIWIG in the mid to long term a painful enough problem to justify the short to mid term disruptions that converting away from Wikitext would require? I don't know the answer to that.