Following on from discussions last week around an enhanced in-built wikitext editor, discussion on the wikitech-l developers' mailing list this week concerned existing and new external editors for the MediaWiki software Wikimedia sites are based on. WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") editors of this type "would allow easy editing to newbies, while still allowing to use the full wikisyntax to power users" (as stated by User:Platonides). However, given the complexity of wikitext, WYSIWYGism is notoriously difficult to achieve fully. A list of attempts is given on MediaWiki.org.
This week's discussion started with an external, cross-platform local (rather than web-based)
application. It moved onto another, web-based attempt, the "Myrilion" editor (example). It rewrites the main wikitext parser to OCaml, which can then be turned into a fairly hefty chunk of JavaScript. A number of problems with WYSIWYG editors were discussed, including the inability of many to differentiate between two wikitext elements that give the same HTML output (e.g. [[Foo|Foo]] and [[Foo]]) and inadvertently convert between the two. The projects are similar to the Wikimedia User Experience team's attempts to improve the in-built ease of editing MediaWiki projects. The hope is that shared code and experience could be useful in building new attempts to solve the usability question.
In related news, Dutch developer Jan Paul Posma has published a mock-up of what a web-based MediaWiki editor might look like in the future.
The "coding" phase of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects has now ended and the "evaluation" phase has begun. Each year, Google sponsors student developers to work on open source projects under the guidance of mentors. This year, six such students were selected to work on the MediaWiki software which underpins all Wikimedia sites:
A full list containing more information (including mentors) on each is also available. The Signpost hopes to catch up with the students in the coming weeks and to establish the success of each project and what it might mean for Wikimedia.
Note: not all fixes may have gone live on WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.
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With the resolution of bug #2257, from four years ago, extensions can now access template-style parameters.I don't think anything has happened recently in that area. Support for {{#tag:}} as a work around for the issue happened ages ago (in 2008), and more recently (one year ago minus about a week), an option was added that allows tag extensions to optionally expand template parameters (rev:55682). I don't see anything new that has happened on that front recently (or really that anything else remains to be done, except for maybe PST in tag extensions). Bawolff (talk) 16:40, 17 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]