[WikiEN-l] WYSIWTF

[Erik Moeller]

2011/1/4 David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>:
> What are their thoughts on the Wikia WYSIWYG editor? I presume Wikia
> did usability tests. I don't like the Wikia editor a lot (and find it
> opaque), but I can cope with wikitext.

We've both done internal evaluations of the Wikia RTE, and had several
meetings with their team to review it and its possible use on WMF
sites. This included a demonstration by Gil of applying the RTE to
various Wikipedia articles.

The RTE falls back to wikitext mode when it encounters syntax it can't
handle. You can see this e.g. on
<http://twilightsaga.wikia.com/index.php?title=Bella_Swan&action=edit>.
Wikia has worked on it for years, and a lot of the effort has gone
into reducing the number of edge cases like this, both in terms of
avoiding complete breakage, and in managing clean conversion back and
forth that doesn't lead to dirty diffs (you touch something in one
mode, and destroy markup in the other as a result). Sometimes I find
it hard to find pages that _don't_ break on their more complex wikis,
but to be fair, they are continuing to improve it all the time.

At this point in time, it's the most mature RTE for MediaWiki that I'm
aware of which preserves both editing modes. Other than its remaining
fragility (which is far greater on a site like WP, where it breaks
completely on a large double-digit percentage of articles as of the
last test), in order for it to be truly user-friendly in editing WP,
things like its template-handling (and other complex syntax like
citations) would need to be quite dramatically improved.

So, the short answer is that it's surprisingly mature at this point,
but would still require a big push to be usable by us. The remaining
question we need to answer is whether it's a technical architecture we
want to commit ourselves to, as per my earlier note, or whether
(perhaps in partnership with Wikia and others who might benefit from
it) we want to focus on a next-generation architecture, consistent
with what Google and others have been doing in their editing UIs.

-- 
Erik Möller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

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