I agree with all of you. A WYSIWYG editor can not replace Wikitext. In some cases, wikitext is a programing language like Java and NetBeans can't program Java for Java programmers.
However, there 2 aspects of using MediaWiki: daily use (users may be novice, know little of Wikitext, edit simple pages) and template writing (experienced users write complicated code in templates for others to use). With the first one, WYSIWYG is a wonderful feature, with the second one, it's clumsy. So, a WYSIWYG editor should only cover some features of wikitext like: simple page representation, reference, template inclusion, extension call, page preview, categories, inter-wiki and leave others like: parser functions, magic variables, noinclude, includeonly, parameters...
Through this mailing-list, I see that we are struggling with Wikitext, which is a time-consuming work. What I suggest is, instead of wasting more time, we can change to XML, which is clearer, easy to parse, easy to understand and easy to extend.
2008/2/19, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton@gmail.com>:
On 18/02/2008, Daniel Kinzler <daniel@brightbyte.de> wrote:
> > There is the obvious issue with backwards compatibility there,
> > although that can be overcome with work. The other major issue is that
> > no WYSIWYG system is likely to be as powerful as wikitext, or as quick
> > and easy to use (for experienced users). WYSIWYG is certainly much
> > easier for new users, but once you are familiar with wikitext, it is
> > generally better.
>
> Actually, I don't think these are even the worst problem. The worst problem is
> that the wysiwyg editor would have to cover the full range of what wikitext can
> do now
That's what I mean by "no WYSIWYG system is likely to be as powerful
as wikitext".
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