On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 8:55 AM, Jan Paul Posma jp.posma@gmail.com wrote:
Hello everyone,
As this is my first post to the mailing list, let me introduce myself shortly. My name is Jan Paul Posma, and I'm a 20 year old Computer Science student from the Netherlands. I was introduced to MediaWiki by Roan Kattouw, contractor for the Usability Initiative, who also happens to be a friend of mine. :-)
The reason for mailing to the list is the research I'll be conducting this year: building a new editor for MediaWiki. Now I guess this has been discussed over and over again, but this is a bit different. Instead of building a true WYSIWYG editor, I'm proposing to build an editor that's based on adding extra markup to the original, rendered page. This extra markup provides the ability to edit these segments. With this approach, it's possible to slowly enable editing for different elements. First, we can enable editing for "simple" sentences (thus the title sentence-level editing). "Simple" in this context means: without most wikicodes. I.e. only links are allowed, and perhaps bold and italic. This editor can be extended step by step to include other elements, such as references, images, templates, lists, tables, etc.
The last few weeks I've worked on some prototypes to illustrate this idea. You can find the most advanced prototype here: http://janpaulposma.nl/sle/prototype/prototype3.html The full project proposal and prototypes can be found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:JanPaul123/Sentence-level_editing
Right now I'm not looking for anything in specific, just whether or not you think this is a good idea, technically feasible, etc. If you have suggestions of any kind I'll be happy to hear them!
This is a really nice design. I'll be interested to see how it handles all the ugly edge cases that Wikitext makes possible ;-)
I do notice that the "Preview" button for sentence-level editing doesn't quite work (it shows the old text). There's some stuff missing, but I assume that this is because it's not finished yet.
Either way, this is a really awesome first step towards a more friendly editing interface. Thanks for sharing.