[libreoffice-website] Re: [WIKI] WYSIWYG editor

Le 2012-10-05 08:14, C a écrit :

> This was one of the major reasons behind not migrating the OOo wiki (a
> few years ago).
>
> Some things that people are maybe not considering when they say that
> WYSIWYG editor is a make/break for the LibreOffice Wiki:
>
>   - MediaWiki is not obscure.  This is the Wiki engine that drives
> Wikipedia.  If "normal" people manage to contribute to Wikipeidia by
> the millions, I'm sure that the same people are smart enough to handle
> the exact same Wiki engine on the LibreOffice Wiki.

Well, there are countless ways to rationalize this. We could say that 
contrary to MediaWiki which attract a large variety of people with 
different skillsets, LibreOffice, on the other hand, specializes in 
servicing WYSIWYG users, in a very heavy way. So, if we are to try to 
gain good wiki contributors from our pool of users, it would stand to 
reason that we would offer WYSIWYG tools for them.

Seems kind of pointless to attract WYSIWYG people, and then offer the 
same people text editors as tools to develop their own wiki site. Just 
seems counter-productive to me. I dunno.

Even MediaWiki has come to the same conclusion in increasing their 
roster of contributors:

"The decline in new contributor growth is the single most serious 
challenge facing the Wikimedia movement in the year 2011. Removing the 
avoidable technical impediments associated with Wikimedia's editing 
interface is a necessary pre-condition for increasing the number of 
Wikimedia contributors." 
[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor#Rationale]


>   - There are many extensions in use on the current MediaWiki that are
> often not easily duplicated on a new Wiki engine.  A migration to a
> new Wiki will mean that every page in the 3.3Gb of data will need to
> be validated and in many cases rewritten - the migration tools cannot
> (usually) handle the custom code syntax that is linked to the many
> extensions in use.  These exceptions (on a huge number of pages) will
> have to be manually migrated... page by page.

Yup, a big undertaking that would be comparable to removing all of the 
extra code out of LibreOffice. I agree. But, it could still be done.

>   - There is a MediaWiki extension for LibreOffice.  Why not promote
> the use of that extension?  If it's not good enough, then it
> should/could be tagged for improvement (GSOC maybe?).
>
>
> > I'd rather prefer some developer looking into the code of the existing
> > WYSIWYG extensions for MediaWiki to make it work with 1.21.

This would be an excellent idea. But ... finding a dev to work on it ... 
is another thing. I am not really sure why it is still showing on 
LibreOffice suite if it is not being worked on. It has been broken for 
quite a while.

> This is a much better option.  The issue is not that there is no
> WYSIWYG editor, just that the currently available ones do not work
> with the latest Wiki engine.  That's something that can be solved with
> a LOT less effort than what would be required for a full on migration.
>
> - As Florian noted (and linked), there is a new WYSIWYG editor in
> development.  (works fine in Chrome on Linux by the way)

Yup. It is still in development and a little more active now.

> All this is not to say a migration is a bad idea... but you have to
> realize the incredible amount of work this will require.  I think
> Florian is being kind and underestimating the work by saying "MONTHS".
>
> C.

I think we are all aware of the daunting task. Florian has been great at 
moving us onto the newest and brightest from Wikimedia which is a large 
task, and, for which I am grateful. But, it just doesn't have that 
appeal to our much needed content contributors when they need to learn a 
completely new language to publish materials when they have done as much 
as possible to get away from it by adopting our WYSIWYG office suite.

Anyway, hopefully some day the visual editor will appear on the wiki. 
One can only hope.


--
Marc Paré
Marc@MarcPare.com
http://www.parEntreprise.com
parEntreprise.com Supports OpenDocument Formats (ODF)
parEntreprise.com Supports http://www.LibreOffice.org


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