How Can Wikipedia's Visual Editor Top Other Word Processors?

First time accepted submitter azadnama writes "Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, is aware of the fact the MediaWiki formatting syntax is a major obstacle for people's participation in writing on the site. To address this problem, the Foundation is developing VisualEditor—a web-based WYSIWYG interface for editing articles. It's supposed to be similar to a word processor, like LibreOffice, Microsoft Word, Pages, Google Docs, and others. And this is the time to ask: What did your word processor get wrong and how can Wikipedia's VisualEditor get it right?"

Comments

Re:CKEditor

[Owyn]

CKEditor is an HTML editor. Wikitext is not HTML. Wikia (my employer) does use a heavily modified CKEditor to round trip wikitext->html->wikitext but it's fragile and the experience lacks polish. The foundation decided to start over from scratch with a new design using an intermediate data representation coupled with a new parser and a simple extensible UI. I think they're going in the right direction, it's just going to take a while.

Re:WYSIWYG is already a failure by definition.

[Elbereth]

First, I just want to say that I agree with you. However, it's a bit arrogant to insist that people do everything your way, instead of giving them the ability to do things the way they prefer. If people want to contribute to Wikipedia using a WYSIWYG editor, then Wikipedia should provide such a feature, even if it runs counter to everything that the web stands for. Getting people to contribute and lowering the barrier to entry is more important than ideological purity.

Ideological purity for its own sake leads to the Reign of Terror.