If we do create a WYSIWYG editing system, I’d be in favor of a split-screen system, which still requires people to write the wiki code, but which automatically, using an AJAX tool, displays what the editing does on-the-fly. I imagine this would be relatively easy. The hard part comes in when you have people editing the “display” version — which is very hard to make look exactly like the real display version — and producing clean, editable, standard wiki code. I’m not saying it can’t be done (probably, someone’s already done it; I don’t know, I haven’t kept up with that), I’m just saying that it’s incredibly hard.

Other than that, I completely agree that the Mediwiki software has a needless learning curve. I am no techno-dummy but it took me a month to get a good handle on some stuff. The ability to make basic templates have come only recently to me.

Indeed, contributing an article should be as easy to use as a basic word processor.

Most wiki neophytes I show Citizendium to really like our articles, and they seem to agree that our expertise and real name systems make lots of sense. Then I show them the page editing screen, and they get that glassy, ‘too techie for me’ look in their eyes. Their enthusiasm just drains. It’s been really frustrating.

Mike, I for one think we should seek to make contributing to the wiki as easy as possible technically, and systemically so.

The main problem is that MediaWiki wikitext does not have a defined syntax - the definition is quite literally the PHP code - and is mathematically impossible to put into EBNF. (Many have tried, got to 95% and realised it wasn’t actually possible.) So there are no alternate parsers, and no WYSIWYG can cover the lot. But 95% coverage in a WYSIWYG editor should get most of the useful bits.

(a) IRC is damn useful, but you do not in any way have to be on IRC to be a productive Wikipedia editor, admin or even arbitrator. And many aren’t and won’t be.

(b) I find it hard to conceive how any Internet idiot can lower the world’s collective IQ with instant messaging, but thinking people who would want to contribute to an encyclopedia can’t. And IRC is just IM based around chatrooms instead of one-to-one. If you can use Trillian or GAIM/Pidgin, you can use IRC.

For anyone who wishes to test FckEditor on their wiki, go to http://mediawiki.fckeditor.net/index.php/Sandbox

That CZ service would allow potential authors starting new articles to submit in .rtf or .doc/.docx, etc. Academics, for example, often write their articles in MS Word, using EndNote or Reference Manager to “cite-while-you-write” and when fiished have the program automatically format the bibliography. Personally, I find using the MediaWiki editor for source-citing a huge barrier to productivity, including even starting a new article.

The DocumentConveters could handle submitted edits the same way.

Who would volunteer? Or know someone whom thy could ask if they would volunteer? What ideas do you have to improve this idea? Why would this not work? Let me know here or at my Talk page: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/User:Anthony.Sebastian

I’m not a computer person, and I don’t like things that make my life difficult, so I know whereof I speak.

People my age can remember having to learn all sorts of “impossible” code: Wordperfect and stand-alone word processors and stuff. You had to learn how to change tape in your brain the way you change tapes when you switch languages.

“Kids” don’t seem to be afraid of anything–if you need to use a computer, VCR (oh, sorry–DVD to you lot–I still have VCR stuff)–ask a 10-year-old.

If you’re a member of any kind of onlne forum, you have to learn non-wysiwyg stuff.

So who are the reluctant ones? Is it a 20-something group? or a 50-something plus group?

Really, it’s when things get hard that I glaze over. Or get annoyed because I’ve got too many demands on my time to mess with code.

The fact is, you can start an article on CZ by picking a subject, clicking the start article button, typing away, and then hitting SAVE.

*That’s* what we need to tell people.

If they are not able to (or they just don’t *@#$%^&* feel like bothering with) [[code(computer)|formatting their work]] well, by gum that’s just fine, there are people who actually *like* doing that sort of thing.

If they learn basic formatting but metadata pages and {{subpages}} make them glaze over, well, again, let them leave it alone till they’re good and ready.

To use Mike’s example, maybe we need a here’s-what-we-show-newbies-page that just has typed text and the result?

I think the cz-tools team should check it up.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM
[2] http://www.lyx.org/

Thank you.

You say: “The fact is, you can start an article on CZ by picking a subject, clicking the start article button, typing away, and then hitting SAVE.” That prescription would not help if the article you start has images, citations, color fonts, special characters and tables, just to mention a few items.

I speak from personal experience as well.

Anyone who seriously knows what IRC is really like would never suggest it as a serious conversation environment for anything, let alone real academic and intelligent conversation.

For editorial tasks, I agree: it’s not the right format. But Jason is just wrong in asserting that IRC is an editorial part of Wikipedia.

Back to the other matters of Jason’s post, I have to say that the more I read over at the MediaWiki wiki, and at the COmmons, and see get poo-pooed all of the feature requests that would make the software easy to use, the more I think he is right. Of course, I must confess my skepticism over the fact that much of anything will ever come out of any open source movement that is really user-friendly. Why would it be? The other geeks are their real “customer base”.

More and more I feel there simply must be some better option than MediaWiki for collaborative publishing.

Also, I just created an article, and had to edit 4 pages to get it to be “correct” - the talk page, the metadata page, and some kind of “Approval” page.