On 8/10/06, Steve Bennett stevage@gmail.com wrote:
Do we? I was thinking about this. Even the wikiwyg we looked at a couple of weeks ago essentially forces you to edit wikitext, and separately shows it to you. Do we have anything that works like Word, for instance?
I ask this not as a clueless user, or on behalf of people who are too lazy to learn syntax. But as someone who does a *lot* of editing in MediaWiki, and who finds the "spot the mistake, click edit, find the same spot in the code, change, save" cycle far too slow. Editing would be a hell of a lot more efficient if one could simply click on the place to edit, and start typing. I imagine the basic cycle looking like this:
- Click on the text.
- A surrounding patch of text (a sentence? a paragraph?) is "locked"
(no one else can edit it) and highlighted, and somehow rendered "editable". 3. Edit, drag text around etc. If necessary, mark other bits of text as being "locked" as well so you can edit them. 4. Press a commit button.
I don't know that this would work well for more complex syntax like tables, but even if it only worked for small, local changes (like typo fixing) it would be a major improvement.
That would be nice, and I would consider that a UI improvement, but not really in the same direction as wysiwyg editing. Personally, I am not convinced that wysiwyg editing is as simple a process as people think. Sure it would be nice to let anyone edit as easily as they do in Word, but Word doesn't have templates, and wikilinks, and wikilinks with alternate text.
When you are designing the UI people really need to think about specifics, sure having a bold button would be easy to make something bold, but what would be the easiest way to fill in {{Taxobox}}. That is a hard question, but I can guarantee you trying to mimic the formatting toolbar in Word is not the answer.
When people start to edit a wiki there is some learning they have to do, no matter how easy you make it. The set of skills people need to edit a word document are not all the skills they need, even at a conceptual level, to edit a wiki. They will have to learn new concepts. Now, that's not to say that the system we have is perfect, having to find the text once, then click edit and find it again is a good example, and some of the obvious formatting things (bold etc) could actually use standard UI, but there is a lot of stuff that is honestly conceptually new.
Dealing with that is a difficult problem, but I'm not sure if the wikiwyg project is being very useful in that direction.