Folks:
I've avoided entering this topic because, as a Wikipedia administrator,
I might be perceived as being biased in favor of Wikimedia, but I want
to echo and amplify what Stephen has said:
WYSIWYG editors may be easier for novice wikipedians to use, but
markup-based editors are far easier for experienced people to use
and get the results precisely correct (where "precisely correct" means
exactly conformant to the intended "house style" of the wiki).
One use case Stephen didn't mention is the case where you decide
to make some sort of global change to the project. (I don't know if it's
true of the Alassian wiki, but) In a pure WYSIWIG system, you'll get to
make that change individually to every page in the project and the
odds of you making the exact same change to every page are
vanishingly small. In a markup-based system, though, such a change
is trivially easy.
I spend a lot of my life wrestling with several very large Microsoft Visio
documents and I would trade away the WYSIWIG editor for a markup-
based editor in a heartbeat.
I've used quite a few Wiki systems (albeit, not the Alassian one) but
in my experience, so far, the Wikimedia system is the best.
Atlant
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf
Of Stephen Kelly
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2011 20:00
To: Jeff Mitchell
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Development] Call for Volunteers: SSO-improvements for
qt-project.org
On Wednesday, December 07, 2011 14:23:27 you wrote:
> On 12/7/2011 9:26 AM, Stephen Kelly wrote:
> > The worst thing about Confluence is that it can only be edited in rich
> > text mode. There is no markup behind that which you can switch to in
> > order to edit pages.
>
> <snip>
>
> > It is highly frustrating for me, and I'd expect for other people who are
> > used to dealing with code.
>
> <snip>
>
> I'm with you in that it can be nice to format things in a textual way,
> but I do think for the average user out there, not having to learn or
> think about wiki syntax can be a powerful motivator for actually
> contributing to a wiki.
The rich text only editor would have to be trialed with the people who are
expected to be using it with non-trivial use cases. Use cases like 'start a
wiki page about blah' is too trivial.
Things like 'split a page into three different pages, splitting its categories
too' or 'turn an email that was sent to the mailing list into a wiki page', or
add the content from a newsletter that is sent every week to a wiki page for
storing that content. Programmers (and myself) often use mediawiki markup in
emails to mailing lists
== with headers like this ==
=== and subheaders like this ===
both for easy copy/pasting into a wiki and because readers (of appropriate
mailing lists) recognise what it means.
Try pasting an email like that into confluence 4, and then going to each header
one by one and doing the mouse clicky thing with a combobox to turn each one
into an appropriate header, then realize that when you do that the entire
paragraph above or below becomes formatted as a header, and you have to undo
and add some newlines, then make it a header again.
Then notice that all of your paragraphs have wierd line spacing and decide
whether you're bothered fixing it.
Or maybe a usecase to trial is to add markup to a page which a lazy person
(like myself, possibly) just pasted in there because it is important content
and the page should be formatted properly.
Maybe that's a usecase that doesn't need to be easy for people who value markup
or is already easy enough, or maybe the people who the Qt wiki is aimed at are
not expected to prefer markup over a rich text editor.
Or maybe they are expected to prefer it.
The choice of wiki engine probably wouldn't affect whether I use it in
particular.
My point is that I before considering confluence 4, it should be trialed with
non-trivial 2-months-on usecases with the people who are expected to be the
ones using it.
Of course, depending on the plan with DevNet, it might be a moot point anyway.
Thanks,
--
Stephen Kelly <[email protected]> | Software Engineer
KDAB (Deutschland) GmbH & Co.KG, a KDAB Group Company
www.kdab.com || Germany +49-30-521325470 || Sweden (HQ) +46-563-540090
KDAB - Qt Experts - Platform-Independent Software Solutions
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