Comments on: Is it time to kill off wikitext? http://jamesmckay.net/2007/11/is-it-time-to-kill-off-wikitext/ because there are few things that are less logical than business logic Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:27:57 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: James http://jamesmckay.net/2007/11/is-it-time-to-kill-off-wikitext/comment-page-1/#comment-2102 James Sun, 02 Dec 2007 09:45:52 +0000 http://www.jamesmckay.net/2007/11/is-it-time-to-kill-off-wikitext/#comment-2102 So would you say that the benefits of wikitext and WYSIWYG editing are mutually exclusive, or do you think that rich text editors in the browser are not mature enough as a technology to handle that kind of thing yet? So would you say that the benefits of wikitext and WYSIWYG editing are mutually exclusive, or do you think that rich text editors in the browser are not mature enough as a technology to handle that kind of thing yet?

]]> By: Sikon http://jamesmckay.net/2007/11/is-it-time-to-kill-off-wikitext/comment-page-1/#comment-2099 Sikon Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:55:07 +0000 http://www.jamesmckay.net/2007/11/is-it-time-to-kill-off-wikitext/#comment-2099 How about... no. The current makeup, including the template system, is a killer feature of MediaWiki. It's simple, streamlined, yet infinitely extensible. You're just not going to achieve this level of flexibility with a WYSIWYG editor. Besides, WYSIWYG is not suitable for Wikipedia's mission, which has content over presentation. It has its uses - for example, for publishing systems. But not for a knowledge base, nor for any kind of documentation, which needs semantic markup. How about… no.

The current makeup, including the template system, is a killer feature of MediaWiki. It’s simple, streamlined, yet infinitely extensible. You’re just not going to achieve this level of flexibility with a WYSIWYG editor.

Besides, WYSIWYG is not suitable for Wikipedia’s mission, which has content over presentation. It has its uses – for example, for publishing systems. But not for a knowledge base, nor for any kind of documentation, which needs semantic markup.

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