Some progress on Wikipedia editing

Wikipedia has long been suffering from its rather raw “wiki markup” editing experience. The reason is that the underlying software is stuck in the mud and any progress is slow and painful. Right now there is some excitement over progress on the “visual editor” of Mediawiki. As you can see in the video below the look and feel is 2016, while the functionality is still 1999. How we will catch-up with Google Docs or Medium or any reasonable editing experience this way remains a mystery to me.

Posted on

2016-05-14

4. Society-at-large, 4.4 Wikis and Wikipedia

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T. Bayer

2016-05-14

PS: regarding catch-up, VisualEditor is actually superior to most HTML editors today, e.g. that of WordPress. See for example this blog post explaining why the Public Library of Science chose it for their in-house publishing platform (from one and a half years ago; a lot of further development has happened since then):
“I highly recommend to anyone building a book platform, or any other kind of knowledge production platform, that you examine VE more closely. It is a sophisticated software and has been carefully thought through. […] VE also approaches content editing in a way that will open the door to concurrent editing via operational transformations in HTML, which is a hard problem and currently only solved by Google and Wikidocs..”
http://www.adamhyde.net/building-book-production-platforms-p3/

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1. Dirk Riehle
  
  2016-05-14
  
  Thanks, Tilman, for the update. My thinking goes more towards the structured information that WP contains or should contain, not so much the plain HTML formatting/type-of-editing. I’m still hoping to right click on a category and rename it (across all textual occurrences) by just typing over the new label. Or modify the category lattice as such.
  
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T. Bayer

2016-05-14

Uh, that’s not the new visual editor (which you can compare in action at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wiki_markup&veaction=edit ). It’s a quick hack backporting some features from VisualEditor to the old wikitext editor, but without redesigning the whole thing as it had been done with VisualEditor.
Grüße, Tilman

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