Question: why does it have to normalise at all?
I do think that the editing environment at Wikipedia means that consistent non-normalised editing by wikitext users and subsequent normalisation by anyone using WYSIWYG would be messy and disruptive, but would a change whereby it more precisely records the wikitext, and then doesn't try and change it unless that part of the document is edited, be feasible?
On 2 May 2011 19:34, Mark A. Hershberger mhershberger@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com writes:
On 2 May 2011 13:09, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Maury Markowitz maury.markowitz@gmail.com wrote:
Editors do this all the time anyway. Typically using automated tools so they don't have to do any actual work.
Sure, but those aren't typically mixed with "real" changes in the same edit. That's what was hard: spotting the actual changes in the midst of all the normalization noise.
The normalisation only really needs to happen once, though.
What about combining the benefits of separated automatic edits with the ease of WYSIWYG modification?
Upon starting to edit the page the WYSIWYG editor automatically makes a “normalization” edit. Such edits are noted with the comment “WYSIWYG Normalization” or some such so that they're easy to find.
When the user clicks “Save page”, a separate edit is made containing just the user's changes.
This seems like it would preserve the usefulness of diffs, doesn't it?
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