[Mediawiki-l] Apple's Wiki Server brings WYSIWYG to wiki

Brion Vibber brion at pobox.com
Tue Aug 8 13:35:38 UTC 2006


On 8/8/06, Christiaan Briggs <christiaan at yurkycross.co.uk> wrote:

> Looks like we'll finally be ditching MediaWiki in our office next
> year. Apple has come to the party with a WYSIWYG wiki of its own:


Congratulations!

MediaWiki is not targeted at internal office use. While some people do use
it successfully in this market, we offer no support, have no marketing, make
no income from it, and don't make any effort whatsoever to be more than
tolerable for it.

I'm glad you've found other software which is more appropriate for your
requirements.

We really are not trying to sell MediaWiki to you or to anyone. It *really
is* good for us if you need something different and you *use* something
different because of that. That's better both for you and for us.



> The biggest
> obstacle, it has often seemed to me, is an installed base of
> Wikipedians who see wiki markup as a way of protecting their
> territory and minimising participation by others.



That's absolutely false. Rather, the reason that all attempts have failed so
far is that we have an installed base of millions of *pages* of *content*
over *five years* with which compatibility *must* be *retained* for
*Wikimedia*. Hacky HTML editors damage the text and destroy pages during
editing, which is completely contrary to our requirement to preserve page
text across tens of thousands of edits.

We simply have no interest in your intranet. It's not on our radar. We have
no deal to provide you with intranet software. It's not what we do.

> Thanks to those who have been working on WYSIWYG for MediaWiki,
> particularly in trying to integrate FCKEditor. I wish your efforts
> had borne fruit earlier and it's a pity you haven't had more support,
> but I'm sure you'll get there eventually.

I advise you not to waste time waiting on these integration efforts. The
back-and-forth conversion they require is likely to never work properly.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)



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