[Foundation-l] Big problem to solve: good WYSIWYG on WMF wikis

[David Gerard]

On 28 December 2010 16:06, Victor Vasiliev <vasilvv at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have thought about WYSIWYG editor for Wikipedia and found it
> technically impossible. The main and key problem of WYSIWIG are
> templates. You have to understand that templates are not single
> element of Wikipedia syntax, they are integral part of page markup.
> You do not insert "infobox template", you insert infobox *itself*, and
> from what I heard the templates were the main concern of many editors
> who were scared of wikitext.
> Now think of how many templates are there in Wikipedia, how frequently
> they are changed and how much time it would take to implement their
> editing.


Yes. So how do we sensibly - usably - deal with templates in a
word-processor-like layout? Is there a way that passes usability
muster for non-geeks? How do others do it? Do their methods actually
work?

e.g. Wikia has WYSIWYG editing and templates. They have a sort of
solution to template editing in WYSIWYG. It's not great, but people
sort of cope. How did they get there? What can be done to make it
better, *conceptually*?

What I'm saying there is that we don't start from the assumption that
we know nothing and have to start from scratch, forming our answers
only from pure application of personal brilliance; we should start
from the assumption that we know actually quite a bit, if we only know
who to ask and where. Does it require throwing out all previous work?
etc., etc. And this is the sort of question that requires actual
expense on resources to answer.

Given that considerable work has gone on already, what would we do
with resources to apply to the problem?


- d.