[Mediawiki-l] Status of wysiwyg editors for mw1.9?

dirk.westfal at frankfurter-verein.de dirk.westfal at frankfurter-verein.de
Tue Apr 10 20:48:15 UTC 2007


>* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cacycle/wikEd
I`ve looked into this one too, but since it is 'the joy' for an admin, it isnt a tool for casual users :(


>In this regard, here's some food for thought that might be of interest: 
>http://wikieducator.org/Talk:Tectonic_shift_think_tank#WikiGUI

I`d go 'two ways': a basic editor that just allows simple formatting and a full fledged syntax-highlightning editor for the maintainers/admins.

Any approach to make a casual user who eg. just wants/has to write some meeting minutes in the wiki would not accept the syntaxhighlightning approach (imho/ime)


>>> And if you WANT to do formatting, here's a cheatsheet.  But don't let
>>> that stand in the way of documenting what you know.
>> 
>> And we also have that one :)

>So do we, but ours could certainly be improved.
...

>Would you guys mind sharing your cheat sheets? Maybe we could combine 
>efforts at http://scratchpad.wikia.com, possibly cerating a (very basic) 
>help-section template for new MW admins?

The cheat-sheet i`m currently using is extremely simple: 
- headlines
- bulleted/numbered lists
- bold
- code
- links
- images
- categories

The hard part is to get people used to:
a) closing tags
b) memorizing syntax

So i decided to run with just the most basic subset of possible formatting.


>> ok, there we currently have only just ONE, but we`re working on it :)
>Same here; I'm the only "wiki coach", and reception hasn't really been 
>overwhelming so far...

It took me a couple months to get one of our contractors (who doesn`t have a docu system himself) to actually use the wiki. 'But then it would be only in YOUR system' - was one of the most often heard complaint.
PDF/ODF Export et.al. finally convinced him.


>> It works here - but only with the pure technical staff (and even some >>of those guys are quite hard to change).

>Again, same here; most users with a non-technical background are scared 
>off by the plain-text editing right away, so they don't even get to 
>realize how easy it actually is...


And that`s exactly my point! :)

Consider this:
A dristibuted, longtime project which is documentated using mw.
A 'manager' supervising the project two hours a week detects something he does not like in the docu. 
He wants to be able to use 'huge fonts' in the color 'red' for comments and finally to be able to format some parts of text as bulleted list (they like these).
There is absolutely NO way to make this person using wikicode or using syntax highlighting if he isn`t one of the the already convinced techstaff.

Breaking user expirience or gaining acceptance on changes in them (Word or OO vs. wikicode or syntax highlightning) on that user level is imho quite impossible (above manager is already fuming - no way he`d remember the rarely used wikisyntax, but he`s still able to use those nice 'formatting knobs' in m$-word).

This might be a drastic example, but imho it pinpoints the problem :)


> -- F.

thanks for the input and best regards,
dwe



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