On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Daniel Friesen
<lists(a)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)