How about attacking the problem by using something that already exists...
- The Wikimedia Foundation gets a lot of support from Google, financially. How about we ask for some technology support as well? Google has a completely plugin-independant JS-based editor in Google Docs, as well as plenty of coders. - The simplest solution seems to be to translate WYS output into wikicode, so using the Google Docs editor, we simply have to translate the bold-looking text into wikicode. Timeline of editing: [WYSIWYG editor view:] *Albert Einstein *was a popular [Save page] [One moment please] <HIDDEN> (translation) (wikicode output): *'''Albert Einstein''' *was a popular </HIDDEN> [Article re-appears] *Albert Einstein *was a popular What do you think? On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 10:27 AM, Brion Vibber <br...@pobox.com> wrote: > On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 8:43 AM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > 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? > > > > My primary interest at the moment in this area is to reframe the question a > bit; rather than "how do we make good WYSIWYG that works on the way > Wikipedia pages' markup and templates are structured now" -- which we know > has been extremely hard to get going -- to instead consider "how do we make > good WYSIWYG that does the sorts of things we currently use markup and > templates for, plus the things we wish we could do that we can't?" > > We have indeed learned a *huge* amount from the last decade of Wikipedia > and > friends, among them: > > * authors and readers crave advanced systems for data & format-sharing (eg > putting structured info into infoboxes) and interactive features (even just > sticking a marker on a map!) > * most authors prefer simplicity of editing (keep the complicated stuff out > of the way until you need it) > * some authors will happily dive into hardcore coding to create the tools > they need (templates, user/site JS, gadgets) > * many other authors will very happily use those tools once they're created > * the less the guts of those tools are exposed, the easier it is for other > people to reuse them > > > The incredible creativity of Wikimedians in extending the frontend > capabilities of MediaWiki through custom JavaScript, and the markup system > through templates, has been blowing my mind for years. I want to find a way > to point that creativity straight forward, as it were, and use it to kick > some ass. :) > > > Within the Wikimedia ecosystem, we can roughly divide the world into > "Wikipedia" and "all the other projects". MediaWiki was created for > Wikipedia, based on previous software that had been adapted to the needs of > Wikipedia; and while the editing and template systems are sometimes > awkward, > they work. > > Our other projects like Commons, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and > Wikinews have *never* been as well served. The freeform markup model -- > which works very well for body text on Wikipedia even if it's icky for > creating tables, diagrams and information sets -- has been a poorer fit, > and > little effort has been spent on actually creating ways to support them > well. > > Commons needs better tools for annotating and grouping media resources. > > Wiktionary needs structured data with editing and search tools geared > towards it. > > Wikibooks needs a structure model that's based on groups of pages and media > resources, instead of just standalone freetext articles which may happen to > link to each other. > > Wikiversity needs all those, and more interactive features and the ability > for users to group themselves socially and work together. > > > Getting anything done that would work on the huge, well-developed, > wildly-popular Wikipedia has always been a non-starter because it has to > deal with 10 years of backwards-compatibility from the get-go. I think it's > going to be a *lot* easier to get things going on those smaller projects > which are now so poorly served that most people don't even know they exist. > :) > > This isn't a problem specific to Wikimedia; established organizations of > all > sorts have a very difficult time getting new ideas over that hump from "not > good enough for our core needs" to "*bam* slap it everywhere". By > concentrating on the areas that aren't served at all well by the current > system, we can make much greater headway in the early stages of > development; > Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" calls this "competing > against non-consumption". > > > For the Wikipedia case, we need to incubate the next generation of > templating up to the point that they can actually undercut and replace > today's wikitext templates, or I worry we're just going to be sitting > around > going "gosh I wish we could replace these templates and have markup that > works cleanly in wysiwyg" forever. > > > My current thoughts are to concentrate on a few areas: > 1) create a widget/gadget/template/extension/plugin model built around > embedding blocks of information within a larger context... > 2) ...where the data and rendering can be reasonably separate... (eg, not > having to pull tricks where you manually mix different levels of table > templates to make the infobox work right) > 3) ...and the rendering can be as simple, or as fancy as complex, as your > imagination and HTML5 allow. > > -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com) > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
