2011/1/4 David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com>: > What are their thoughts on the Wikia WYSIWYG editor? I presume Wikia > did usability tests. I don't like the Wikia editor a lot (and find it > opaque), but I can cope with wikitext.
We've both done internal evaluations of the Wikia RTE, and had several meetings with their team to review it and its possible use on WMF sites. This included a demonstration by Gil of applying the RTE to various Wikipedia articles. The RTE falls back to wikitext mode when it encounters syntax it can't handle. You can see this e.g. on <http://twilightsaga.wikia.com/index.php?title=Bella_Swan&action=edit>. Wikia has worked on it for years, and a lot of the effort has gone into reducing the number of edge cases like this, both in terms of avoiding complete breakage, and in managing clean conversion back and forth that doesn't lead to dirty diffs (you touch something in one mode, and destroy markup in the other as a result). Sometimes I find it hard to find pages that _don't_ break on their more complex wikis, but to be fair, they are continuing to improve it all the time. At this point in time, it's the most mature RTE for MediaWiki that I'm aware of which preserves both editing modes. Other than its remaining fragility (which is far greater on a site like WP, where it breaks completely on a large double-digit percentage of articles as of the last test), in order for it to be truly user-friendly in editing WP, things like its template-handling (and other complex syntax like citations) would need to be quite dramatically improved. So, the short answer is that it's surprisingly mature at this point, but would still require a big push to be usable by us. The remaining question we need to answer is whether it's a technical architecture we want to commit ourselves to, as per my earlier note, or whether (perhaps in partnership with Wikia and others who might benefit from it) we want to focus on a next-generation architecture, consistent with what Google and others have been doing in their editing UIs. -- Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l