Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor
"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.)
I sympathize with the sentiment expressed by the OP here, but his conclusions -- especially that the VisualEditor project is not worth undertaking -- are, I believe, very much off base.
The Wikimedia Foundation did a great deal of research, including professional usability testing, and reached the (I believe fairly self-evident!) conclusion that a visual editing environment was sorely needed. You can go look up videos of regular people attempting to contribute to Wikipedia if you don't believe me[1].
The difficulty of the task, the particularities of hardcore Wikipedia editors, and the importance of preserving the record that Wikipedia's edits represent makes the project have a very real amount of essential complexity. If you think this is easy then you have not done much work with complex rich text editing on the web[2]. People in this thread suggesting Wikipedia use an off-the-shelf OSS rich text editor don't understand the requirements of the problem.
The team at the Wikimedia Foundation has done an exceptional job given the task at hand, especially given their relatively small amount of funding (relative to other sites Wikipedia's size). The reasons the VisualEditor isn't enabled by default have to do with getting from a 97% solution to a 99.9% solution[3], and based on the work I've seen out of the Wikimedia engineering team, I'm sure they will get there.
1. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_feel_stupid_v2.o... and http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability_and_Experience...
1. Or really any kind of rich text editing.
2. In terms of never, ever causing a problem with the underlying wikitext.
"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."
Oh, the arbitrary causation!
So he goes from:
" Thing is, editors hated its bugginess so much that the roll-out was reverted shortly afterwards."
to:
" Their solution to this was a WYSIWYG editor, which failed for the basic reason that it denies the fact that Wikipedia is a program. "
Something tells me he might be making it up as he goes along! I wonder how successful Microsoft Word would have been with markdown editor.
This 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...
An IDE looks like a solution for developers by developers. I'm not sure it will appeal to most people. I consider the Visual Editor to be a good solution for non-techie newcomers. They are more used to visually similar tools.
Take 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.
> Visual Editor was rolled out in 2013. Thing is, editors hated its bugginess so much that the roll-out was reverted shortly afterwards. (…) Why did the Visual Editor fail? Because it tries to deny the basic fact that Wikipedia is a program, not a word document.
Eh, I can't really agree with this. VisualEditor rollout was indeed premature (critical features like template editing were developed literally days before it), but a year has passed and it's gone a long way since then. Haters still hate it, but personally I find it more pleasant to use than wikitext for many tasks.
This was a really interesting read, though. I still this there's value in the WYSIWYG paradigm, even if we have to fall back to "IDE mode" for infoboxes and such (right now if you double-click a template, you're shown a key-value table to fill in; there's no live preview…). After all, most of the content of Wikipedia is text with some light formatting.
I must say that Wikipedia community has become very effective at giving partisan editors tools to target undesirable editors - a Byzantine collection of policies which admins overzealously enforce without a second thought, and without thinking of a big picture. Admins in fact are incentivized not to involve themselves, which basically gives the enforcement gun to POV-pushers which are intimately acquainted with all the glorious details of the relevant wikilese. I urge admins to think outside the policy-enforcing request-observing mode.
> This tension is irresolvable: the terms “WYSIWYG” and “abstraction” are literally antonyms.
Except they aren't. WYSIWYG is an abstraction over the code layer that works in the terms of "bold", "italics" and "underline".
> The one unconventional suggestion is the idea of a correspondence between the characters of the source text and the HTML text.
Did you get a chance to check out fellow HN homepage link Paperman [1][2]? It offers exactly what you propose: Double-clicking on the results frame highlights the relevant line in the source, and vice versa. This could easily be adapted to match your suggestion.
[1] http://paperman.patricklorio.com/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8507310
They should implement an editor like http://medium.com or http://slimwiki.com
I would echo the suspicion that the problems here are cultural and not technical, however, I think the solution is kind of technical.
Basically, in future why assume we have one definitive repository of objective fact? The notion is ridiculous. What I believe will happen is a git-ification of Wikipedia, so you can fork the whole thing, run your own when you disagree with the direction, and pull in changes from those you trust. If you're going to attempt to fix this class of problems this is the only way forward.
mediawiki-mode in emacs seems like a good solution, and emacs has proven to be a good enough IDE for other programming languages.
They should also have mechanisms in place to stop events like these from happening:
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/09/06/wikistorming-colleges...
My understanding is they don't want more idiots editing, it's a 'feature' that it's tricky to edit.
I also considered the decline is that it's kinda 'complete' it's not like the old days where it was easy to contribute something important and meaningful.
Talk is still cheap. I think a prototype would be far more convincing than a blog post.
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If that blog was a wiki, we could correct the typos.
gwern had a thing or two to say about wikipedia. As I remember, he said its biggest issues were cultural and that technology issues were a red herring. I'm interested if he has anything to add.
I love the subtle inclusion of the Operation Northwoods page as an example.
Don't you mean CMS?
Maybe something like an enhanced LaTeX.
The main problem with Wikipedia is not the editor, but the wiki. Because wiki pages are structured as pages it lets real or imagined experts have control of the entire page. This leads to groupthink, censorship, bullying, gender bias, harassment, excessive rules, vandalism, edit-warring, unsortable page content, inability to cross-reference data across pages.
At Newslines, we solve all of these problem for news and biography pages (the most popular pages on Wikipedia) by using the news event as the core content of the page, as well as a number of other features that allow users to write without harassment. As a result, unlike Wikipedia, which has 90% young male contributors, we have 80% women and minority contributors.