On 8/10/06, cohesion cohesion@sleepyhead.org wrote:
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.
Word has all those things, and much more besides, like floating text frames, headers and footers, flexible section numbering (flexible sections for that matter), columns, all kinds of fancy interactions between pictures and text, a drawing mode, etc etc. MediaWiki ain't got nothing on Word, trust me :)
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.
IMHO, the formatting toolbar we have is almost useless. It helps the absolute newbie carry out the simplest tasks, and that's it - for anyone else, it's faster typing '''foo''' then typing foo, selecting it, and pressing the bold button. OTOH, the one piece of syntax I struggle to remember is tables, and there's no assistance there.
I don't know exactly how far it's possible to go in javascript, but using ctrl+b for bold, ctrl+k for wikilinks etc would be great. You know, as a minimal solution, if it was possible to select some text on the screen, and have an edit box appear with the corresponding wikitext that you could edit, that would still be a significant step forward. For that to happen, we'd really need MediaWiki to be spitting out pointers in its output that the GUI could use to match up source and rendered text.
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
Yes...but everyone already knows how to edit a word document. Making a wiki usable by someone with no new skills would be a good thing.
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.
Like templates. And that's about it. There's nothing remotely conceptually new about a piped wikilink.
Dealing with that is a difficult problem, but I'm not sure if the wikiwyg project is being very useful in that direction.
It's easier to locate the wikitext corresponding to certain output with wikiwyg than without it.
Steve