On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Daniel Friesen lists@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote:
Most of the wiki I was involved in on Wikia all have the RTE disabled because the RTE made additional unwanted changes when editing destroying diffs, in one case destroyed a bulleted list item every time the page was edited,
I've had a similar experience on a wiki I was involved in about 3-4 years ago. We gave the editor a try, but every time you edited an article, no matter how small the edit, the editor would go ahead and "normalize" all links of the form [[Foo]] to [[Foo|Foo]]. In a several-kilobyte encyclopedic article with links in every other sentence, this produces an enormous diff that makes it impossible to tell what the real change was.
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.
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.
So that's what I know about the issues when introducing FCKeditor to an existing wikitext 'codebase'. I hear it's fairly decent when used from the start, but I'm not familiar enough with it to comment on that.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)