On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 1:47 PM, Panos Louridas louridas@grnet.gr wrote:
Hi,
At the Greek Research and Education Network (GRNET) we look at the possibility of contributing to the development of WYSIWYG editor support in Wikipedia. We understand that considerable work has already taken place in the area, e.g.:
- http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIFTW
- https://svn.wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/extensions/wikia/RTE/
- http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:JanPaul123/Sentence-level_editing
We therefore think that it will not be productive to reinvent the wheel over here.
Our contribution can take the form of providing developers that will devote part (or all) of their time for some months in 2011. We welcome any comments and suggestions on how we could push this forward, and in particular:
- Specific tasks / components that need to be designed, developed, optimized, etc., and estimates of effort and timeframe.
Hi Panos,
a very generous offer! One I would like to take you up on, for WYSIFTW as you no doubt have guessed :-)
WYSIFTW is approaching feature completeness, as far as wiki markup parsing is concerned, and improves on usability as well. (just try the new "floating context hover boxes", in lack of a better name, that I added last night, wich come up when you hover over a template or a references, for show/hide and rendered preview, and the new optional rendering for templates as a key-value-pair table)
For support later this year, tasks would include * increase parsing performance (mostly post-parsing steps, focusing on DOM lookup and manipulation) * improve editing usability (cut/copy/paste, better specialised dialogs for images, table/row/cell properties etc.) * usability testing (I'm using up volunteers fast ;-) * creating a test suite (to make sure that changes don't accidentally break anything) * general compatibility testing (find pages that parse/unparse wrongly, and patch the code accordingly)
I like the sentence-level editing function, but once I add section-level editing to WYSIFTW, these two will start to converge. I'm curious which of these will be more suited to small fixes and adding single sentences/references etc.
As for RTE, I know little about. Apparently, it is not suitable for Wikipedia in its current form. From brief looks at CKeditor, it might be quite some work to make it behave nicely around parsed wikitext, as used on Wikipedia.
Cheers, Magnus