On Sat, 11 Feb 2012 20:37:12 -0800, Stanton McCandlish smccandlish@gmail.com wrote:
The obvious solution to me is to build this and alpha test it internally, then beta test it on Wikia, not Wikipedia. You'll get more diverse feedback, and when things inevitably break, they'll just mess up stuff like the Battlestar Wiki, not the world's largest, most-used encyclopedia.
-- Stanton McCandlish McCandlish Consulting 9505 Tanoan Dr NE Albuquerque NM 87111-5836
505 715-7650
Wikia already has it's own Visual Editor. Wikia's Visual Editor already breaks content and has some communities complaining about it and ensuring Wikia has it disabled on their wiki. Wikia has already screwed with their edit page implementation enough that any Visual Editor built to work in vanilla MediaWiki or WikiEditor won't even function on Wikia, so it's a worthless place to test anyways. Wikia is going to take ages to shed 1.16, doesn't make a very good test bed for something that should end up running on WikiMedia which uses the newest stable code it can, especially when all that code is supposed to be based on ResourceLoader improvements and JavaScript code that comes with RL that won't be on Wikia. Wikia also has a different audience than Wikipedia. Unlike Wikipedia which has a balance of technical and non-technical users, Wikia has a large number of wikis which are tilted heavily to the non-technical of users. To the point where Wikia can release a Visual Editor, have it break piles of source text, and have no-one care because a number of wikis don't have any users that even look at the source. It's not a very good place to test a visual editor when there are wikis with users that won't even complain when something is broken.