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

[Stephanie Daugherty]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 6:43 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
> I'm thinking along the mindset that only "advanced" users would prefer to
directly edit code regardless of the existence of a good WYSIWY* editor, and
that validation would be performed as it's saved. A syntax-highlighting and
code completing editor would make manual edits of XML code palatable. Also,
while XML text isn't that much better for manual edits because of it's
verbosity, it's no different than manually editing HTML code, which people
successfully manage to do all the time, and it can actually be easier to
grok than wikitext because its more generous in where it will allow you to
use whitespace, allowing you to use indentation to make the code easy to
follow:

<article>
  <title>Foo</title>
  <section title="Introduction">
    This is the introduction. Maybe you really want the <internal-link
article="Sandbox">Sandbox</internal-link>
  </section>
   &boilerplate; <!--Some boilerplate text to be transcluded via an
entity--!>
  <category name="Test" />
</article>

Yes, the added verbosity is bad, but if it enables better tools to be used,
including an editor that's actually usable by "the rest of us", it's worth
it.