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

[Christiaan Briggs]

On 8 Aug 2006, at 2:35 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:

> 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.

Actually I'm an active editor on Wikipedia and other online wikis  
using MediaWiki. My comments about WYSIWYG apply equally to such  
sites. That is to say I think it's a great obstacle to participation.  
It just happens that I'm in control of our office intranet, so to  
increase participation I shall be ditching MediaWiki and moving to a  
more modern wiki.

> 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.

Sorry I disagree. I don't think MediaWiki is "really is good for us".  
I despise working with wiki markup and I know many very capable  
people who could be great contributors to Wikipedia but they're not  
because of wiki markup.

>> 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.

I know what the arguments are, I've heard them all and participated  
in many of the discussions. From my experience, however, the *real*  
obstacle is an installed base of technocrats who sees WYSIWYG as a  
threat to their positions, therefore all efforts to move in that  
direction are slow. Mostly they don't say such things outright,  
although some do. For instance I've had people argue that wiki markup  
is some kind of "intelligence" hurdle that people should have to  
overcome before being allowed to contribute.

> 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.

Over the years I've learnt to dismiss comments that include the  
qualifier "never". They're invariably way off the mark.

There's also nothing stopping Wikipedia, etc. from moving to a  
different platform altogether of course.

Cheers,
Christiaan