While from a user's perspective the various editors seen on the page you linked to appear to be drop-in replacements for the current plain text solution, I can assure you that there are many other reasons for not yet deploying them on Wikipedia that go far beyond our ability to provide users with a preference to turn them off. Almost all of those visual editors require the use of not-yet-stable reverse parsing, and many cause articles to change in ways the user did not intend, such as adding white-space places the user did not touch, or stripping out HTML comments from the code. There are other downsides as well, which are represented in an article closely related to the one you linked to, which is the results of the extensions chosen for evaluation from the list of nominated ones.
http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environment_Survey/MediaWiki_Extensions/...
An existing example of us providing users with such an option however can be seen in the ability to turn various editing-related gadgets such as wikiEd. I think this shows that should a more visual editing interface become able to be deployed, we certainly would make it optional.
- Trevor Parscal
On 4/24/09 5:30 AM, Jacopo Corbetta wrote:
On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 05:59, Andrew Garrettagarrett@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'd like to look towards trimming some of the existing preferences that are no longer relevant, and adding new preferences as common sense dictates.
Can I suggest adding a "preferred editor" preference? Ideally, it should be a dropdown box (given the variety of existing visual editorshttp://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environment_Survey/MediaWiki_Extensions/Nomination#Editing, an admin might wish to install more than one), but a simple "disable the visual editor" checkbox is probably enough for most setups (and simpler to maintain).
Thanks, bye
Jacopo Corbetta j.corbetta@sssup.it jacopo.corbetta@gmail.com
WYMeditor MediaWiki integration: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor
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