[Foundation-l] Big problem to solve: good WYSIWYG on WMF wikis

[David Gerard]

On 28 December 2010 16:54, Stephanie Daugherty <sdaugherty at gmail.com> wrote:

> Not only is the current markup a barrier to participation, it's a barrier to
> development. As I argued on Wikien-l, starting over with a markup that can
> be syntacticly validated, preferably one that is XML based would reap huge
> rewards in the safety and effectiveness of automated tools - authors of
> tools like AWB have just as much trouble making software handle the corner
> cases in wikitext markup as new editors have understanding it.


In every discussion so far, throwing out wikitext and replacing it
with something that isn't a crawling horror has been considered a
non-starter, given ten years and terabytes of legacy wikitext.

If you think you can swing throwing out wikitext and barring the
actual code from human editing - XML is not safely human editable in
any circumstances - then good luck to you, but I don't like your
chances.


- d.