Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

One of MediaWiki's (and by implication Wikimedia's) longest standing issues - how wikitext can be made more friendly to new and inexperienced users, resurfaced this week. A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) solution would allow for editors to use a word processor-like interface to view articles during editing as they would appear after saving, before converting them into the relevant wikitext (see previous Signpost coverage from last August). David Gerard, writing on both the Foundation-l and Wikitech-l mailing lists, suggests that this could raise participation by a significant amount, but the problems were vast:

Responses to David Gerard's post raised even more possible issues, among them the lack of a defined syntax for wikitext and Wikimedians' reliance on (often idiosyncratic) templates. George William Herbert added "'We can't do away with wikitext' [has] always been the intermediate conclusion (in between 'My god, we need to do something about this problem' and 'This is hopeless, we give up again')".

In celebrating the new year, Magnus Manske - one of the original MediaWiki developers - also demonstrated his first attempt at an in-browser solution of the issues, entitled "WYSIWTF" (wikitech-l mailing list).

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.

• A new feature has been written to allow users of up-to-date browsers to access thumbnails of their image uploads prior to transfer (wikitech-l mailing list). The feature would allow users to check they are uploading the right file, and whether or not they are about to overwrite a file that is identical but inferior, or completely different.
• A new page documenting with which versions of other pieces of software and with which browsers the MediaWiki software is compatible was started (wikitech-l mailing list).
• Austin McChord, CEO of a firm specialising in data backup and storage, offered to host a copy of the WMF's backups (colloquially known as "dumps") (wikitech-l mailing list).
• Wikimedia Engineering Program Manager Tomasz Finc blogged about a new version of the Open Web Analytics software, the development of which the WMF had been guiding so as to be able to use it on Wikimedia sites, initially for the fundraiser.

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3 January 2011 (all comments)

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On prompting, Magnus has change the name to WYSIFTW :-) - 193.22.89.22 (talk) 14:42, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've written a blog post as well, reiterating what's in the email and linking to Magnus' editor. He's also given it a page on meta: meta:WYSIFTW - David Gerard (talk) 23:08, 4 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]