[Wikimedia-l] On the gentrification of Wikipedia, by Superbass

[Erik Moeller]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 2:23 PM, James Forrester
<jforrester at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> That'd be great, yes (and really easy to do using Parsoid's DOM) - we
> could do annotations, comments, content collapsing, etc. - but I can't see
> how it would work with wikitext in a way that would leave it
> sanely-editable for users. I'm not sure we want to start building features
> that only for work VisualEditor users at this point.

Which, for the record, is one of our biggest challenges if we want to
be tied to the idea of markup based editing for all eternity. The more
metadata we want to tie to specific aspects of the markup (e.g.
authorship annotations, comments, regions, etc.) the more we really
run into the limitations of easy markup-based editing.

This is already the case for some of our features, like the
translation extension, which makes it possible to mark up parts of the
document as being in need of translation. So you end up with markup
like this:

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! <translate><!--T:21-->
Revenue</translate>
!style="text-align:right"| <translate><!--T:22-->
$50,559,430</translate>
|-
| '''<translate><!--T:23-->
Expenses:</translate>''' ||
|-
|  <translate><!--T:24-->
Engineering Group</translate>
|style="text-align:right"| <translate><!--T:25-->
$13,523,471</translate>
|-
|  <translate><!--T:26-->
Fundraiser Group</translate>
|style="text-align:right"| <translate><!--T:27-->
$3,265,731</translate>

etc.

At the very least, as visual editing becomes more powerful, markup
editing likely will become even more cumbersome when dealing with a
lot of this kind of complexity. I also doubt that features like
realtime collaboration will be supportable in the markup mode. That's
why our goal is to really build a visual editor that appeals to
advanced users as well as new ones (which is why we've wanted it to be
so visible to advanced users). We've still got a long way to go in
that regard, of course.

That doesn't mean, however, that we're comfortable just inheriting
wikitext paradigms into the visual editing experience in order to win
over advanced users early. We do have to say "no" to some
requirements, and one of the "asks" which we will definitely not
implement is parsing wikitext in VisualEditor to offer the equivalent
functionality. That way lies madness.

Erik
-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation