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Matthew Simoneau wrote:
A page on Meta http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG_editor lists several experiments and implementation ideas, but is anyone seriously tackling this problem? Should we take up a collection to hire a developer to work on this? Or maybe to offer X PRIZE style bounty for a successful implementation? I'm in for $25!
These are dead-ends, don't waste your time or money on anything that tries to tack on an HTML editor widget and requires translating back and forth (an inherently lossy operation which will never work correctly over thousands of edits of an article's lifetime).
Something like WikiWizard is more interesting: (http://jspwiki.org/wiki/WikiWizard site seems down at the moment)
A proper wysiwyg system either needs to be built around the wiki markup directly -- in which case you need a proper definition of the markup and a standard, clean parser if you want to do anything more than syntax highlighting and such pretties that WikiWizard does -- or else the markup needs to be built around the editor -- such as dumping the wiki syntax entirely and using an HTML-based markup directly. (I believe a number of the 'intranet'-oriented wiki-like systems do this.)
We're not likely to dump our markup in the next few years. Nothing else is likely to happen without the markup being formalized.
- -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com / brion @ wikimedia.org)