[Mediawiki-l] what-you-see-is-what-you-get edit program?

[Rick DeNatale]

On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 21:53:50 +0000, Rowan Collins
<rowan.collins at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:08:38 -0700, Sterling D. Allan
> <sterlingda at pureenergysystems.com> wrote:
> 
> > It seems to me that early on the development curve of wiki software made a
> > choice (a bad one, in my opinion) to go the code direction rather than the
> > WYSIWYG direction.
> 
> Well, *extremely* early on in the development of wiki software, the
> choice was made to favour *simplicity*. Ward Cunningham called it
> "wiki wiki", meaning quick, and that's what it was - a barebones
> structure, that "just worked", without too much fuss. 

It seem to me that there's a kind of vicious circle here.

I was one of the early user's of Ward's original web site, which is
still plugging away on c2.com.  It's still quite simple, there is
minimal markup, and the output is pretty close to the input, so it's
almost wysiwyg. Ward didn't implement any fancy features.

Newer wiki implementations, as new implementations of anything tend to
do, have added features, mediawiki is the most feature rich wiki I've
run across. I was personally attracted to it because of the support
for inline images. I was using twiki which is much closer in it's
markup language "sophistication" to wikiwikiweb than mediawiki is, but
wanted to put images in my articles rather than just as e-mail like
attachments so I moved to mediawiki.

I guess my point is that the features have driven things to be less
wysiwyg than they used to be in wiki land where wyg is more
restricted.

Not that I wouldn't love to have better tools to allow less markup
language literate folks to contribute to my wiki.