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

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 3:43 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.

That is true - "We can't do away with Wikitext" always been the
intermediate conclusion (in between "My god, we need to do something
about this problem" and "This is hopeless, we give up again").

Perhaps it's time to start some exercises in noneuclidian Wiki
development, and just assume the opposite and see what happens.


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com