Thomas Dalton wrote:
Not if you need tables. Tables in wiki-markup are the most awful things I ever saw. And most technical data is traditionally presented in tables.
A table generator would be good - not full WYSIWYG, just somewhere to input number of rows and columns and then you get a textbox for each cell and type the appropriate code in them, and then it gives you the full wikisyntax for the table.
There's an extra toolbar button on en-wiki which will create a table skeleton for you. Here's the result of simply clicking the button: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&oldid=127636442
It should not be too difficult for people to understand that they simply replace the text in the skeleton, and that the various symbols create the table structure. Surely this is easier than translating HTML tags from not-exactly-english to whatever language you're dealing with.
That button used to fire up a basic table-editing widget, but it broke some browsers (and probably some other stuff) and was replaced with the simpler version. However that code would still be available (see here http://preview.tinyurl.com/342nby)if someone wanted to take a shot at making it less horrible.
HTH HAND