Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
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Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
#2This isn't really feasible, as Mediawiki's markup is far too hard to parse[0]. You can't just write an IDE for wikitext in a nice language, you'd need to instrument Mediawiki itself somehow to give fine grained information.
[0] http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/adcs2010/proceedings/pdf/paper%204...
Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
#3This isn't really feasible, as Mediawiki's markup is far too hard to parse[0]. You can't just write an IDE for wikitext in a nice language, you'd need to instrument Mediawiki itself somehow to give fine grained information. [0] http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/adcs2010/proceedings/pdf/paper%204...
There exists a bidirectional parser that converts between wikitext and HTML/XML DOM with RDFa. It's called Parsoid[0], and it powers VisualEditor, as well as a number of other applications.
Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
#4This isn't really feasible, as Mediawiki's markup is far too hard to parse[0]. You can't just write an IDE for wikitext in a nice language, you'd need to instrument Mediawiki itself somehow to give fine grained information. [0] http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/adcs2010/proceedings/pdf/paper%204...
Nothing beats being told that what you just did is in fact not feasible ;) Check out this page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid
This is the bidirectional conversion engine between wikitext and HTML+RDFa that powers VisualEditor and several other tools. It tracks source range to DOM structure correspondence as proposed in the post. At this point, the IDE is basically a user interface and performance problem. The conversion is readily available through a REST interface, but on the largest articles parsing from modified wikitext to HTML can take around 10 seconds. Most of that time is spent in the expansion of the myriad of citation templates that we like people to add. It is possible to speed this up to something more usable for an IDE, but it's not trivial.
You might also be interested in this blog post about some of the challenges we encountered while building Parsoid: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2013/03/04/parsoid-how-wikipedia-c...
Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
#5Talk is still cheap. I think a prototype would be far more convincing than a blog post.
Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
#6"Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago."
To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn't have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make it less rewarding to participate (e.g. http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-dec... ).
(Edit: Not trying to be negative -- the suggestions in the article sound cool anyway.)
Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
#7"Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago." To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn't have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make…
As you say, dealing with the UI is fine. Dealing with the bureaucrats isn't. Having your account banned and your new article marked for spam by a very abrasive person, when trying to add legitimate content, rather than being supported through the maze of rules, as happened to a colleague the other day. That is a problem which stops meaningful content being added.
Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
#8Take a look at the Wikidata project - it's designed for editing structured data.
Unfortunately I wouldn't say it is very easy to use - the Wikipedia editor is much easier. It's also completely unclear which parts of Wikidata data are used in Wikipedia, and where.
That means the Wikidata data is usually much worse than the Wikipedia data, even if it theoretically easier for machines to use.
Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
#9They should implement an editor like http://medium.com or http://slimwiki.com
Re: Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
#10They should implement an editor like http://medium.com or http://slimwiki.com
I would vote for something like StackEdit beta [1]. It is really nice in the way it keeps the syntax (markdown) in a WYSIWYG-style editor.