Simetrical+wikilist at gmail
Mar 20, 2008, 10:29 AM
Post #2 of 5
(282 views)
Permalink
|
On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 12:44 PM, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio[at]gmail.com> wrote:
> * Would this issue be solved quicker by having a few funded developers
> working on it? (If so, how many wo/man hours would be needed - what size of
> a funding bid would be needed?)
It could be partially solved if people were working on it. And, well,
it is. Wikia has an extension, for instance, and there's FCKeditor.
I at least have generally assumed that it can't be completely solved
(i.e., having feature parity with wikitext editing without common or
unfixable bugs) without a fairly dramatic rethink of a large part of
MediaWiki's infrastructure. Whether such a rethink would be accepted
into core to begin with is a fairly important question that seems
unanswered.
As for man-hours (what, you've never read The Mythical Man-Month?),
it's probably closer to three months of work than to three days or
three years to write a complete solution, assuming it would be
accepted. More precise than that I'm not going to attempt. Of course
this assumes it's done by somehow who really knows what they're doing.
And it assumes a "proper" solution is necessary.
> * What does the fckeditor in existence *not* do yet? <
> http://mediawiki.fckeditor.net> (If the answer is: "too much - it only does
> a tiny handful of things compared to what we need" - well then, that answers
> my question. :-))
I haven't looked at the tool much. It's almost certain that there
will be some cases where it will fail horribly. However, glancing it
over, it looks very slick and well-done. It loads up [[George W.
Bush]] perfectly, to pick a representative heavily-marked-up article,
except that it doesn't seem to display the images right. It would be
very interesting to try enabling it experimentally at Wikimedia as an
option to see if we get any complaints about non-idempotent saves or
anything else problematic.
I'm still sure there are some fuzzy spots where it will break, but as
a partial solution it seems better than I had expected. It would be
interesting to consider the possibility of eventually including it in
MediaWiki core, or shipping it as a preinstalled extension. The first
step for that is going to have to be testing on Wikimedia sites, I
think, which needs one of the roots to come on board, like Brion.
What are your thoughts on trying it out (as a disabled-by-default
option), Brion?
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l[at]lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
|
