[Mediawiki-l] what-you-see-is-what-you-get edit program?

Mon Mar 14 18:59:47 UTC 2005

Two thoughts:

While the editing difficulty of wiki as it is does weed out the less 
motivated, in my particular nook of the Internet (cutting edge energy tech), 
it is weeding far more than I would like.  People might be brilliant in 
science, but often are not so brilliant in word composition.  I hope to make 
it as easy as possible for them.

I can see that the sheer number of HTML/Wiki code possibilities used in 
mediawiki would make the WYSIWYG task nearly impossible if one wanted to be 
able to enable all possible formatting options.  So the "price" one will pay 
in going with a WYSIWYG editor would be a narrowing of formatting options.

In my case, that is a price that I would be willing to pay because I want to 
make it easy for those brilliant scientists who barely know how to spell.

Sterling D. Allan
http://peswiki.com

p.s. thanks for the input

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jan Steinman" <Jan at Bytesmiths.com>
To: "MediaWiki announcements and site admin list" 
<mediawiki-l at Wikimedia.org>
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 11:19 AM
Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] what-you-see-is-what-you-get edit program?

I would not go quite so far as Paul, but I think there are better
places to put resources than WYSIWYG editing.

The beauty of Wiki is it is collaborative. Some people have ideas they
don't articulate well. Some people are expert wordsmiths, but don't
necessarily have ideas. Some people are editors and copyreaders. Some
people delight in formatting arcana.

The downside of WYSIWYG is Bad Design. Now everyone with a pirated copy
of Word is a publisher -- NOT!

I've been through various flavors of roff, TeX, Merganthalier and
Quikset typesetting codes, HTML, and many others. I think the beauty of
formatting code is it makes you think. Because of the "high entry fee"
(aka "dumbass tax"), you spend a bit more time figuring out how things
are going to go together, and it shows in the results.

That's one of the reasons I Don't Do Word. Most Word docs are
atrocious, with multiple spaces used for indentation and multiple line
feeds used for vertical spacing. Someone sends me a Word document, and
by the time my translators get through with it, it needs to be
re-formatted anyway. I avoid hurting anyone's feelings that I
re-formatted their "masterpiece" by explaining that I don't have Word,
and my translation software "must have messed it up." :-)

It's not that WYSIWYG doesn't have a place. But let's just keep it
there, okay?