This thread has gotten WAY off topic - so I wanted to try and help clarify a few things and then get it back on-topic if at all possible.
* As Roan mentioned, we are planning on implementing a *wiki-text *editing interface with collapsible blocks for template calls and tables. We may also get a bonus of basic syntax highlighting, but that's not a driving feature. * WYSIWYG is a hope, dream, intention, and long-term-plan of the Wikimedia Foundation - but it's not going to be a reality until we can make progress in at least 3 areas (explained below) and perhaps others as well. * It's important to understand that wiki-text it'self is not the enemy of WYSIWYG, these (and perhaps others as well) are... o *Data corruption: *All current solutions convert wiki-text to some kind of HTML, edit it as if it were HTML, and then convert it back, causing disconnection between the original content and edited content. This in-turn causes diffs to show changes made by the lossy process for conversion such as white-space, tables being in short or long notation, and HTML comments being stripped. More importantly of course, it changes the wiki-text of the page in ways the user did not intend to and wipes out important formatting and comments that people using text editing interfaces (by choice or because their browser is unsupported) need, want and use.* * o *Template abuse: *Template calls do not always result in whole objects. When expanding a template, the result is allowed entirely arbitrary. For instance, I've seen templates that create only the head, a single row, or the foot for a table. When the user wants to change the table, they click edit, and not only does the software not have any way of knowing that these consecutive template calls are related.* * o *Embedded page logic:* Template functions are not visually representable in any way I've ever seen that would make any sense to a non-programmer, yet they often have a profound impact on the content of the page. Nesting a series of if statements is especially going to be a mess in a GUI. * This is not to say I have no ideas or plans on how to solve these issues. We are actively making choices to pave the way for WYSIWYG, but a topic like this hasn't yet proven to be very useful in this process. So far I have only seen the same circle of "Editing wiki-text sucks!" -> "We need WYSIWYG!" -> "WYSIWYG is broken" -> "It must be wiki-text's fault!" -> "Let's change wiki-text" -> "But it's so easy to edit!" -> "No it's not! Editing wiki-text sucks" -> and so on... So, FYI, this is not a new or in anyway original chain of thought or conversation - it's not bad, it's just going to be seen as spam to most people on this list. * The topic is supposed to be on Template Editing which is, at least in the way it's being proposed, a little less of a stale topic - so where is all the energy on that front? We have an XML format to design and complex problems to sort out. Help is really needed. Let's all take a look at the link provided at the beginning of this thread http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_forms
- Trevor