[Mediawiki-l] [Wikitech-l] a wysiwyg editor for wikipedia?

David Gerard dgerard at gmail.com
Mon May 31 22:27:50 UTC 2010


On 31 May 2010 22:53, William Le Ferrand <william at corefarm.com> wrote:

> I've started to develop a simple wysiwyg editor that could be useful to
> wikipedia. Basically the editor gets the wiki code from wikipedai and builds
> the html on client side. Then you can edit the html code as you can imagine
> and when you are done another script converts the html back to wiki code.
>There is a simple demo here :
>http://www.corefarm.com:8080/wysiwyg?article=Open_innovation . You can try
>other pages from http://www.corefarm.com:8080/  (type the article name).
> You comments are welcomed!


What you're working on is a *hard* problem a lot of people have
attempted, with varying success. There's been some discussion of this
of late on mediawiki-l.

The default editor on new wikia.com wikis is WYSIWYG-only. This works
tolerably well (a bit buggy, but actively worked on).

The common WYSIWYG solution for MediaWiki is FCKeditor, which works
*almost* pretty well but:
(a) falls down badly when you try to mix WYSIWYG editing with wikitext
editing and chews up the wikitext
(b) doesn't cope very well with the weirdest stuff done on English
Wikipedia, where wikitext is tortured horribly to squeeze out every
possible emergent side-effect for editor's use
(c) is not actually being worked on at the moment. (Though one
mediawiki-l contributor says he's been using it to good effect on his
work intranet and is seeking permission to release back his changes
under GPL.)

http://mediawiki.fckeditor.net/
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FCKeditor_%28Official%29

FCK+MediaWiki discussion recently:

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-May/thread.html#33896
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-May/thread.html#34061

You may care to have a look at FCKeditor+MediaWiki and see if you've
just reinvented the wheel and can help get that up to scratch. Or,
alternately, if your approach is different enough and better enough to
pursue nevertheless ;-)


- d.



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