WWeekly
Wednesday, September 17th by Ben YatesHey, my post on syntax highlighting got a major shout out on the wikipedia weekly.
(And Andrew Lih said my blog “should be on everyone’s required reading.” Andrew’s a very sharp journalist, so this is high praise. :)
September 17th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Hey, I think we have just published an extension you might be interested in: MeanEditor. It is currently quite “experimental”, but we had many of the same ideas proposed in the podcast.
Yes, the wikitext syntax is a nightmare, but simple syntax can be handled. What’s best, what I think we really need is just the simple syntax, because that’s the right syntax for new contributors to use. I mean, Mediawiki syntax can do many amazing things and I am sure experienced editors and administrators did very good work with them. But making it too easy for inexperienced user to change the text to arbitrary fonts or sizes can be confusing and potentially catastrophic. So a plain MSWord-style WYSIWIG editor is definitely not what Wikipedia needs.
We instead focused on making it simple for new contributors to make good edits, the kind of edits that don’t need wikification or make pages harder to read. We took WYMeditor, a strict semantic XHTML editor and made simple wiki2xhtml and xhtml2wiki functions. They are very simple (certainly too simple) but they work and they understand when they are going to fail. On complex pages the visual editor is automatically disabled and the user is warned that the page contains advanced language.
What I especially like is that this approach leaves a very clean diff. We tested it on simple but real Wikipedia pages and, aside from some whitespace and special characters issues, it did a very clean job. Feel free to experiment with our fresh test wiki to understand what I mean.
The extension is nowhere near finished, but I think we put a fairly good summary of the situation on the MediaWiki extension page. You can read the full details there.
Me and my friend Alessandro worked on this while on a project for Antonio Gulli, who encouraged us to open-source and publish the extension. I sincerely hope that our ideas will be useful to future developments and that we made a good proof-of-concept of what can be done with an integrated visual editor.
If you guys think the idea is good, we can polish the required code patch and propose it for integration, opening the road to powerful integrated PHP extensions.
I really hope to get some feedback from you and from the Wiki community. And BTW, sorry for the long post in my bad English… Ciao da Pisa :-)
September 17th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
I read everyday. You post great stuff!
September 17th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Thanks. :)
September 18th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Jacopo: that looks pretty cool, but it tends to be very difficult to get wikipedia to implement novel features, both for technical reasons (extension has to be able to scale to a kajillion users) and cultural reasons (hardcore wikipedians are deeply conservative with regard to software changes).