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

document structure, not just dumb formatting.

[Anonymous Coward]

It should place structure above formatting.

i.e., sectioning and lists rather than screwing around with fonts, colours and line spacing.

LaTeX gets this right. a UI where users have to specify sectioning and such would be good.

LyX

[Anonymous Coward]

Recreate LyX, or clean up LyX specifically for wiki editing and make it HTML 5. What You See Is What You Mean is what wiki writing needs.

VisualEditor?

[Culture20]

That's the long name for vi. Why don't they consider emacs?

WYSIWYG is already a failure by definition.

[Anonymous Coward]

And so is MediaWiki syntax.

The whole damn point of HTML is "what you see is what you *mean*. If you write hypertext, and think about looks, you already fail, and have to change your thought patterns.
There is a very specific reason HTML is not about looks. Unfortunately apparently its usefulness and elegance is only obvious to programmers. But then again, only programmers have the competence to decide it, so all is fine. Until the idiots come, and listen to the even more uninformed idiots, and fuck everything up. (Examples: Clippy, Windows 8, iOS/Google autocorrect, Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, KDE Plasmids, and even ShowView [if you remember that one].)

And MediaWiki is one of the well-known textbook examples of the inner-platform effect anti-pattern. (TypoScript is another big one.)
It tries to imitate the feature set of HTML, but dumbs it down under a false pretense, and ends up with a just as (or in many cases even more) complicated yet very limited system, that is vastly inferior to the original. It would have made more sense to just use HTML in the first place, and be done with it.

There is no saving the whole thing. The foundation is rotten to the core. The philosophy is deeply, utterly wrong. Nuke it from orbit, and replace it by a nice XHTML subset and a WYSIWYM(ean) model. Done. End of story. End of problems.

Also, if we see Ethiopian kids that never saw a computer before and could not read or write being able to use Android tablets to go to the web, play games and even modify ("hack") it after a few weeks, then nobody can tell me that learning something as ridiculously simple as HTML would be "hard". There is no excuse. If you are a human, and have no extreme mental disability, you can learn HTML! In a DAY.

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.

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 Least of the problems...

[dotHectate]

I have to agree with Frosty here. The page that is linked in the summary clearly identifies the problem in the section entitled Rationale; "The decline in new contributor growth is the single most serious challenge facing the Wikimedia movement in the year 2011." Unfortunately they come to the wrong conclusion as to how to address the issue with the very next sentence; "Removing the avoidable technical impediments associated with Wikimedia's editing interface is a necessary pre-condition for increasing the number of Wikimedia contributors."
Quite frankly, it's obvious that the "technical impediments" of the editing interface are not to blame or else there would not currently be 4,099,684 pages of content (which excludes an additional 24,635,011 "other" pages - source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics ) as I type this. No, as Frosty P. states the problem is with the drama that comes with attempting to edit or create articles on Wikipedia. Rampant deletionism (which wasn't a thing before Wikipedia, hah!) abounds and new users are driven away in frustration. In short, they need to work on getting their current volunteers to operate in a more welcoming manner.
No doubt a majority of the problem is caused by a minority of the editors, but like everything else the vocal minority will out-influence a silent majority. This is the problem.

Why Bother?

[Kagato]

Why bother making a fancy editor when the bigger problem is the cliques of editors driving away new volunteers?