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
Garrett<agarrett(a)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
editors<http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Environment_Survey/MediaWiki…ng>,
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(a)sssup.it
jacopo.corbetta(a)gmail.com
WYMeditor MediaWiki integration:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor
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