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