[WikiEN-l] Why we need a good WYSIWYG editor

[Shlomi Fish]

On Monday 04 Jan 2010 16:23:29 David Gerard wrote:
> Edit completion rate - someone not merely clicking "edit", but
> actually editing and hitting save - goes *way* up. Based on Wikia's
> experience:
> 
> http://wikiangela.com/blog/end-of-2009/#comment-26732
> http://twitter.com/joshuaclerner/status/3602544810
> 
> Wikitext used to be a lot simpler. Now it's impenetrable computer
> code. This is not good enough.
> 
> There are all sorts of reasons why WYSIWYG editing in Mediawiki is a
> Hard Problem. But FCKeditor is really very good these days and I'd
> strongly recommend it for any fresh wikis. Turning it loose on
> existing piles of wikitext such as, ooh, en:wp, is probably a
> different matter.
> 

I personally detest all WYSIWYG web-based editors. They are slow and clunky 
and produce broken markup, and just get in the way. I'm also not fond of 
WYSIWYG word processors and prefer using XHTML or DocBook/XML or other non-
WYSIWYG markup languages. If you are going to enable such a feature, please 
make it optional.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
Best Introductory Programming Language - http://shlom.in/intro-lang

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