Wiki Markup Language: What You See Is… Messy
A few months ago, Jason Calacanis posted a piece on Wikipedia’s Technological Obscurification: Three ways Wikipedia keeps 99% of the population from participating. Not ever having missed a chance to be provocative, he opens with an argument that
The Wikipedia is currently designed to lower participation so it is easier to manage.
Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong to limit participation in Wikipedia–perhaps that’s what necessary to keep the project on track. However, I think we should be really honest about the fact that Wikipedia is not an open system–at least not open in the sense that anyone can participate. Let’s look at just three examples:
1. Wikipedia pages have become increasingly complex and Wikipedia doesn’t support a WYSIWYG editor. WYSIWYG stands for “what you see is what you get,” and that means that as you edit if you make something bold or underline you see bold or underline–just like Microsoft Word. Wikipedia doesn’t use a WYSIWYG because if they did more people could edit the pages–people without technology skills–and that would make the entire system collapse–at least according to the folks at the Wikipedia conference I attended.For example, in this image you can see what it’s like to edit the George W. Bush page:
As you can see you need code in Wiki Markup language in order to edit this page.
2. The Wikipedia uses “Discussion pages” to reach consensus, and these pages are also coded in mediaWiki so that 99% of people can’t figure them out.
3. The Wikipeda uses IRC chat, which 99% of folks don’t know how to use, in order to discuss the inner workings of Wikipedia.
Setting aside Calacanis’s speculations on why things are the way they are, I think he has some interesting facts on his side about participation.
The second and third points are fairly specific to Wikipedia, but the first point– that people can get buried in the complexity of MediaWiki’s arcane style of editing– is spot on for us, too. There’s no question in my mind that requiring contributors to learn arcane wiki markup language (instead of having an easy option for “what you see is what you get” editing) lowers participation and makes participation less democratic. Part of Citizendium’s stated mission is to be less insular than Wikipedia, and I think a necessary part of making that happen is to make editing easier.
Now, we’re juggling plenty of tech issues and plans, and it’s easy for important things to get put on the backburner. So I guess I just want to put the question out there, for when we have more resources: how important is it for Citizendium to have a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get way to edit articles?
-Mike
It just has to be done right. I’ve used a WYSIWYG wiki when teaching philosophy of law — it didn’t go very well, I’m sorry to admit. The wiki markup isn’t the main thing that makes the system apparently hard to master; the concepts and functions, however encoded, is the problem, and there’s no way to make those less difficult.
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.
Comment by Larry Sanger — October 12, 2007 @ 7:49 am
Actually, Mediawiki does support a WYSIWYG editor–sort of. See http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/CZ:Enhancing_your_editing_with_javascript_extensions#wikEd
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.
Comment by Stephen Ewen — October 12, 2007 @ 11:22 am
Personally, I don’t like the split screen idea as it would take too much space. I would guess that a customized version of TinyMCE would work well.
Comment by Phil Deets — October 12, 2007 @ 1:08 pm
I agree with the first point. It does take a while to figure out the markup and some may well give up before they get to that point. The talk page comment seems a long similar lines. But IRC? Not sure how anyone needs IRC to edit the encyclopedia. What CZ and WP really need is a docum,ent converter that can take a standard rtf file and change it into wikimark up. Then authors can work off line and edit on which ever program they feel most comfortable. Likewise a wikimark up to rtf converter would make it easy for authors to download the text of any article and work in their preferred environment. I have no idea if this is possible but I suspect it will stop people complaining about the wiki environment (these comments made on the assumption that a WYSIWYG will not be supported in the near future).
Comment by Chris D — October 12, 2007 @ 2:36 pm
What if we used something like http://www.fckeditor.net/ - a WYSIWYG editor?
Comment by Stephen Ewen — October 12, 2007 @ 2:51 pm
Sorry to post again. Here is a demo: http://www.fckeditor.net/demo
Comment by Stephen Ewen — October 12, 2007 @ 2:52 pm
This would work, too: http://www.jspwiki.org/wiki/WikiWizard
Comment by Stephen Ewen — October 12, 2007 @ 3:24 pm
All very interesting comments. I just have a general personal anecdote to add.
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.
Comment by Mike Johnson — October 12, 2007 @ 4:32 pm
The FckEditor people have already started a project to integrate it with MediaWiki. http://mediawiki.fckeditor.net/index.php/Main_Page
Comment by Nick — October 12, 2007 @ 6:12 pm
Nick, that’s great news, thanks for the info.
Mike, I for one think we should seek to make contributing to the wiki as easy as possible technically, and systemically so.
Comment by Stephen Ewen — October 12, 2007 @ 11:31 pm
Yeah. FCKeditor looks like the best prospect for a WYSIWYG MediaWiki editor at present. I was desperately after one for the work wiki, but it’s not ready yet. But I hold out hope for the near to medium future.
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.
Comment by David Gerard — October 13, 2007 @ 5:27 am
And on the IRC one, I think Jason is just plain wrong.
(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.
Comment by David Gerard — October 13, 2007 @ 5:41 am
I am rather stunned that David defends IRC backrooms as a legitimate part of the governance of WP.
For anyone who wishes to test FckEditor on their wiki, go to http://mediawiki.fckeditor.net/index.php/Sandbox
Comment by Stephen Ewen — October 13, 2007 @ 11:50 am
Regarding Chris Day’s idea of a software document converter (e.g., .RTF to WikiEditor), as an immediate stopgap solution, we might ask for volunteers to serve as human document converters. Volunteer MediaWiki whizzes, who would find converting a snap. Remember the first computers: humans.
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
Comment by Anthony.Sebastian — October 13, 2007 @ 12:56 pm
I’m going to disagree with the assumption that it’s the code that’s making people reluctant to participate–and by that I mean the INITIAL participation.
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?
Comment by Aleta Curry — October 14, 2007 @ 12:49 pm
Stephen I don’t think David is defending IRC, he just says it is useful but good editors do not need it to be productive.
Comment by Chris D — October 14, 2007 @ 3:45 pm
I really like the What You See Is What You Meant [1] way of doing things. Take
LyX [2] for example (maybe the only example there is?).
Everything is about meaning and not styling. You don’t have to worry about how
things will look like on paper or on the HTML page. You don’t have to worry
about spacing or fonts or bolding or italising words. You just mark blocks of
words or lines meaningfully, like “paragraph” (instead of font size 10)
or “title” (instead of font size 30) or “Emphasis” (instead of bold). The
engine that process the lyx format decides how the end format will be
stylized according to standard rules. This lets CZ the freedom to change the
style of its HTML pages without actually changing by hand each and every
page. You also have a good mechanism for citations and notes.
I think the cz-tools team should check it up.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM
[2] http://www.lyx.org/
Thank you.
Comment by Yuval Langer — October 15, 2007 @ 1:59 am
Aleta Curry, I believe you have oversimplified.
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.
Comment by Anthony Sebastian — October 16, 2007 @ 10:35 am
Stephen, I don’t quite see how you get “David defends IRC backrooms as a legitimate part of the governance of WP” from “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.”
Comment by David Gerard — October 16, 2007 @ 5:40 pm
David-
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.
Comment by Robert W King — October 16, 2007 @ 6:34 pm
I’m sure part of this disagreement about IRC as a valid context in which to discuss important things stems from Calacanis’s framing of the issue, which, though interesting, doesn’t strike me as particularly nuanced.
Comment by Mike Johnson — October 16, 2007 @ 8:02 pm
In practice it’s most useful for administrative tasks or when you have a problem or conflict that needs dealing with right away. But it’s not *necessary*.
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.
Comment by David Gerard — October 17, 2007 @ 7:28 am
David, perhaps you might need to get a good ‘ol pseudonym at WP, lay aside your position at WP, and hang out in the trenches of WP. IRC is the grease of Wikipedia tribalism. Those that do not participate and won’t frequently have a very special name: victims, i.e., victims of that tribalism. Even Jimbo has gotten caught with in unflattering positions trying to call forth the backend troops.
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.
Comment by Stephen Ewen — October 18, 2007 @ 12:26 am
Definitely you need to enable a WYSIWYG editor. I’m a phd, using and programming computers for decades, but editing an article with references and so forth is painful. I learned how to do it by digging all over the site, but I’m probably going to forget it before editing next time.
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.
Comment by Doug Holton — December 1, 2007 @ 11:23 pm
[...] myth. We believe you need a barrier to keep those people who aren’t serious out. For example, wikipedia intentionally does this. We aren’t talking about a concrete wall lined with razor wire, but a toddler sized barrier [...]
Pingback by Podcast #79 - Blog – Stack Overflow — January 9, 2010 @ 11:05 pm
Why do we need yet another markup language tho? BBCode is intuitive and simple and easily expandable. The world must have been high when the guy who said “”"this is a title”"” and ==This is a Large heading==
are you fooking kidding me? How about [h1]this is a large heading[/h1] assuming you only want to support a subset of html tags. Wikis are a powerful tool that holds itself back with its joke of a markup language.
Comment by Dss — March 4, 2011 @ 9:20 am