WYSIWYG

"There has to be a vision though, of something better. Maybe something
that is an actual wiki, quick and easy, rather than the template
coding hell Wikipedia's turned into." - something Fred Bauder just
said on wikien-l.


Our current markup is one of our biggest barriers to participation.

AIUI, edit rates are about half what they were in 2005, even as our
fame has gone from "popular" through "famous" to "part of the
structure of the world." I submit that this is not a good or healthy
thing in any way and needs fixing.

People who can handle wikitext really just do not understand how
offputting the computer guacamole is to people who can cope with text
they can see.

We know this is a problem; WYSIWYG that works is something that's been
wanted here forever. There are various hideous technical nightmares in
its way, that make this a big and hairy problem, of the sort where the
hair has hair.

However, I submit that it's important enough we need to attack it with
actual resources anyway.


This is just one data point, where a Canadian government office got
*EIGHT TIMES* the participation in their intranet wiki by putting in a
(heavily locally patched) copy of FCKeditor:


   http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-May/034062.html

"I have to disagree with you given my experience. In one government
department where MediaWiki was installed we saw the active user base
spike from about 1000 users to about 8000 users within a month of having
enabled FCKeditor. FCKeditor definitely has it's warts, but it very
closely matches the experience non-technical people have gotten used to
while using Word or WordPerfect. Leveraging skills people already have
cuts down on training costs and allows them to be productive almost
immediately."

   http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-May/034071.html

"Since a plethora of intelligent people with no desire to learn WikiCode
can now add content, the quality of posts has been in line with the
adoption of wiki use by these people. Thus one would say it has gone up.

"In the beginning there were some hard core users that learned WikiCode,
for the most part they have indicated that when the WYSIWYG fails, they
are able to switch to WikiCode mode to address the problem. This usually
occurs with complex table nesting which is something that few of the
users do anyways. Most document layouts are kept simple. Additionally,
we have a multilingual english/french wiki. As a result the browser
spell-check is insufficient for the most part (not to mention it has
issues with WikiCode). To address this a second spellcheck button was
added to the interface so that both english and french spellcheck could
be available within the same interface (via aspell backend)."


So, the payoffs could be ridiculously huge: eight times the number of
smart and knowledgeable people even being able to *fix typos* on
material they care about.

Here are some problems. (Off the top of my head; please do add more,
all you can think of.)


- The problem:

* Fidelity with the existing body of wikitext. No conversion flag day.
The current body exploits every possible edge case in the regular
expression guacamole we call a "parser". Tim said a few years ago that
any solution has to account for the existing body of text.

* Two-way fidelity. Those who know wikitext will demand to keep it and
will bitterly resist any attempt to take it away from them.

* FCKeditor (now CKeditor) in MediaWiki is all but unmaintained.

* There is no specification for wikitext. Well, there almost is -
compiled as C, it runs a bit slower than the existing PHP compiler.
But it's a start!
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitext-l/2010-August/000318.html


- Attempting to solve it:

* The best brains around Wikipedia, MediaWiki and WMF have dashed
their foreheads against this problem for at least the past five years
and have got *nowhere*. Tim has a whole section in the SVN repository
for "new parser attempts". Sheer brilliance isn't going to solve this
one.

* Tim doesn't scale. Most of our other technical people don't scale.
*We have no resources and still run on almost nothing*.

($14m might sound like enough money to run a popular website, but for
comparison, I work as a sysadmin at a tiny, tiny publishing company
with more money and staff just in our department than that to do
*almost nothing* compared to what WMF achieves. WMF is an INCREDIBLY
efficient organisation.)


- Other attempts:

* Starting from a clear field makes it ridiculously easy. The
government example quoted above is one. Wikia wrote a good WYSIWYG
that works really nicely on new wikis (I'm speaking here as an
experienced wikitext user who happily fixes random typos on Wikia). Of
course, I noted that we can't start from a clear field - we have an
existing body of wikitext.


So, specification of the problem:

* We need good WYSIWYG. The government example suggests that a simple
word-processor-like interface would be enough to give tremendous
results.
* It needs two-way fidelity with almost all existing wikitext.
* We can't throw away existing wikitext, much as we'd love to.
* It's going to cost money in programming the WYSIWYG.
* It's going to cost money in rationalising existing wikitext so that
the most unfeasible formations can be shunted off to legacy for
chewing on.
* It's going to cost money in usability testing and so on.
* It's going to cost money for all sorts of things I haven't even
thought of yet.


This is a problem that would pay off hugely to solve, and that will
take actual money thrown at it.

How would you attack this problem, given actual resources for grunt work?


- d.

---

> > I have thought about WYSIWYG editor for Wikipedia and found it
> > technically impossible. The main and key problem of WYSIWIG are
> > templates. You have to understand that templates are not single
> > element of Wikipedia syntax, they are integral part of page markup.
> > You do not insert "infobox template", you insert infobox *itself*, and
> > from what I heard the templates were the main concern of many editors
> > who were scared of wikitext.
> > Now think of how many templates are there in Wikipedia, how frequently
> > they are changed and how much time it would take to implement their
> > editing.

Yes. So how do we sensibly - usably - deal with templates in a
word-processor-like layout? Is there a way that passes usability
muster for non-geeks? How do others do it? Do their methods actually
work?

e.g. Wikia has WYSIWYG editing and templates. They have a sort of
solution to template editing in WYSIWYG. It's not great, but people
sort of cope. How did they get there? What can be done to make it
better, *conceptually*?

What I'm saying there is that we don't start from the assumption that
we know nothing and have to start from scratch, forming our answers
only from pure application of personal brilliance; we should start
from the assumption that we know actually quite a bit, if we only know
who to ask and where. Does it require throwing out all previous work?
etc., etc. And this is the sort of question that requires actual
expense on resources to answer.

Given that considerable work has gone on already, what would we do
with resources to apply to the problem?


- d.

---

> > e.g. Wikia has WYSIWYG editing and templates. They have a sort of
> > solution to template editing in WYSIWYG. It's not great, but people
> > sort of cope. How did they get there? What can be done to make it
> > better, *conceptually*?
> >
> > What I'm saying there is that we don't start from the assumption that
> > we know nothing and have to start from scratch, forming our answers
> > only from pure application of personal brilliance; we should start
> > from the assumption that we know actually quite a bit, if we only know
> > who to ask and where. Does it require throwing out all previous work?
> > etc., etc. And this is the sort of question that requires actual
> > expense on resources to answer.
> >
> > Given that considerable work has gone on already, what would we do
> > with resources to apply to the problem?
> >
My primary interest at the moment in this area is to reframe the question a
bit; rather than "how do we make good WYSIWYG that works on the way
Wikipedia pages' markup and templates are structured now" -- which we know
has been extremely hard to get going -- to instead consider "how do we make
good WYSIWYG that does the sorts of things we currently use markup and
templates for, plus the things we wish we could do that we can't?"

We have indeed learned a *huge* amount from the last decade of Wikipedia and
friends, among them:

* authors and readers crave advanced systems for data & format-sharing (eg
putting structured info into infoboxes) and interactive features (even just
sticking a marker on a map!)
* most authors prefer simplicity of editing (keep the complicated stuff out
of the way until you need it)
* some authors will happily dive into hardcore coding to create the tools
they need (templates, user/site JS, gadgets)
* many other authors will very happily use those tools once they're created
* the less the guts of those tools are exposed, the easier it is for other
people to reuse them


The incredible creativity of Wikimedians in extending the frontend
capabilities of MediaWiki through custom JavaScript, and the markup system
through templates, has been blowing my mind for years. I want to find a way
to point that creativity straight forward, as it were, and use it to kick
some ass. :)


Within the Wikimedia ecosystem, we can roughly divide the world into
"Wikipedia" and "all the other projects". MediaWiki was created for
Wikipedia, based on previous software that had been adapted to the needs of
Wikipedia; and while the editing and template systems are sometimes awkward,
they work.

Our other projects like Commons, Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and
Wikinews have *never* been as well served. The freeform markup model --
which works very well for body text on Wikipedia even if it's icky for
creating tables, diagrams and information sets -- has been a poorer fit, and
little effort has been spent on actually creating ways to support them well.

Commons needs better tools for annotating and grouping media resources.

Wiktionary needs structured data with editing and search tools geared
towards it.

Wikibooks needs a structure model that's based on groups of pages and media
resources, instead of just standalone freetext articles which may happen to
link to each other.

Wikiversity needs all those, and more interactive features and the ability
for users to group themselves socially and work together.


Getting anything done that would work on the huge, well-developed,
wildly-popular Wikipedia has always been a non-starter because it has to
deal with 10 years of backwards-compatibility from the get-go. I think it's
going to be a *lot* easier to get things going on those smaller projects
which are now so poorly served that most people don't even know they exist.
:)

This isn't a problem specific to Wikimedia; established organizations of all
sorts have a very difficult time getting new ideas over that hump from "not
good enough for our core needs" to "*bam* slap it everywhere". By
concentrating on the areas that aren't served at all well by the current
system, we can make much greater headway in the early stages of development;
Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma" calls this "competing
against non-consumption".


For the Wikipedia case, we need to incubate the next generation of
templating up to the point that they can actually undercut and replace
today's wikitext templates, or I worry we're just going to be sitting around
going "gosh I wish we could replace these templates and have markup that
works cleanly in wysiwyg" forever.


My current thoughts are to concentrate on a few areas:
1) create a widget/gadget/template/extension/plugin model built around
embedding blocks of information within a larger context...
2) ...where the data and rendering can be reasonably separate... (eg, not
having to pull tricks where you manually mix different levels of table
templates to make the infobox work right)
3) ...and the rendering can be as simple, or as fancy as complex, as your
imagination and HTML5 allow.

-- brion vibber

See also

• Hackpad for MediaWiki