WYSIWYG editor for pollwiki

[Michael Allan]

Among other usability improvements, Thomas has long been asking for a
WYSIWYG editor for the pollwiki.  We were exchanging emails offlist
about the editor used by the P2P foundation.  Here's some info on it:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FCKeditor_%28by_FCKeditor_and_Wikia%29

These guys run the latest version of it:
http://www.grassrootswiki.org/index.php/Special:Version

You can try it out here:
http://www.grassrootswiki.org/index.php/Help:Sandbox_for_practicing

Installation of the latest version would require a rebuild of the wiki
server, and upgrade to MediaWiki 1.16.  (These are scheduled to
happen, in any case, in about 3 months.  We could accelerate if it
were a priority.)  Some things we'd have to investigate before
installing:

  1) Will it interfere with the formatting of wikitext?  If a single
     voter opts to use this editor, will it generate false position
     differences (due to its formatting quirks) that the entire tree
     of drafters must henceforth follow?

  2) Is its formatting of wikitext stable?  Will a content change in
     one part of a document affect the formatting in another?
     (Formatting might also change from revision to revision of the
     editor, but that would be a less serious, once-only inconvenience
     for the drafters.)

  3) Is it compatible with the special markup used by Semantic
     MediaWiki?

We may want something like this, at some point.  As a general rule, I
think we should always postpone such changes till they're really
needed.  (It may be needed now for Thomas's user recruiting plans.
We're still discussing that, offlist.)

Eventually we will support free-ranging across multiple drafting
media.  Users could then find their own comfort levels out there in
the cloud, rather than be dependent on what we install in the
pollwiki.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, +1 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/