Roan Kattouw <roan.kattouw <at> gmail.com> writes:
While I'm sure this particular bug has been fixed, it sounds like the underlying problem remains. FCKeditor seems to be converting wikitext to HTML, let users edit the HTML, then convert the HTML back to wikitext. The bugs would then result from the fact that the wikitext->HTML->wikitext round-trip (or wikitext->whatever internal representation is used->wikitext) isn't clean.
Hi, I work at Wikia (although I am relatively new and I have only made small modifications to the editor). This basic criticism of the design is true and is still the source of issues, but it's been improving. I think another problem for experienced wiki editors is the "sea of puzzle pieces" that happens when you edit a complicated page, because it can't render templates (plus a bunch of other things it can't render that show puzzles)
We are currently almost finished with a look-and-feel revamp of the RTE, which is being rolled out over the next few weeks. A blog post about it can be read here:
http://community.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Sarah_Manley/A_Facelift_for_the_Ed...
I'd encourage those with an interest in such things to skim the comments, it's an interesting range of responses, but mostly positive. This re-skin is feature identical for users, but for developers it addresses the puzzle piece problem, which should allow us to more easily add custom widgets to render particular extension tags. It's not in this first release but we've also internally been experimenting with ways to render templates in a more useful way than a green puzzle piece.
I wish I could point to a running instance, but it will be out there soon and I'll put up a link to a test wiki asap if anyone is interested. Many of the look and feel changes are all specific to the custom skin that Wikia uses so I'm not sure how useful it is to others, but the code just got checked in to our trunk SVN this weekend:
http://trac.wikia-code.com/browser/wikia/trunk/extensions/wikia/EditPageResk...
Trevor and I talked about this issue about a year and a half ago, and figured the best way around round-trip bugs was to not do round-trips at all. Instead, wikitext or something close to it should be used as an internal representation, and/or only the parts of the page the user touches should actually change.
Internally we have discussions about the future of the RTE but they are still at the "grand vision" stage to be honest. I think the current plan is to see what transpires with the upcoming Parser redesign and keep our code in sync. The primary authors of this RTE reskin will be at the Berlin hackathon as well.
I'm also happy to field any particular questions about the RTE and get them sent to the right people here at Wikia.
Owen Davis