I'm getting myself ready to take off for Taipei for Wikimania 2007. It's going to be an exciting event -- my first time in Taiwan, too.
I've been ambiguous about Wikimania each year, but I seem to keep going. The stated purpose of the conference is to be solely for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, but people seem to keep coming who don't have anything to do with Wikimedia projects, so I figure I might as well go, too. I like finding out what other people are doing with MediaWiki, and I like getting pumped up about Open Content, the Wiki Way, and freedom of information around the world.
I hope that eventually more general-purpose wiki conferences like RecentChangesCamp and WikiSym will get more public attention, and participation by Wikimedians, in the future. It would relieve some pressure on Wikimania to be something it doesn't seem to want to be.
I'm going to be speaking about Extending wikis with social networking tools. We've done some interesting work with this on Wikitravel Extra, and I plan on using the same technique for other wiki sites in the future. I think it's a powerful way to enhance the unity of consensus knowledge with a multiplicity of varying opinions.
I'm also looking forward to the Debian Birthday Party 2007, thrown by local Debianistas. It should be a lot of fun! There's also a Creative Commons conference happening during Wikimania, which will be pretty interesting. Lots to do in Taiwan this year.
tags: wiki wikimania wikimedia wikipedia debian taiwan taipei
WYSIWYG and MediaWiki
I've been an advocate of WYSIWYG editing in MediaWiki for 3½ years now. So I'm interested to see that the core dev group for FCKeditor have gone the distance to make a real, working WYSIWYG plugin for MediaWiki. The extension has just about everything that I'd want from a WYSIWYG mode for MW:
- It stores articles as Wikitext. Since in-browser editors generate HTML, plugins often try to store HTML in the wiki database, but this conflicts so much with other parts of the site, it's unworkable.
- It's implemented as a MediaWiki extension. This makes it possible for MW installations to experiment with the tool and remove it if they don't like it. It also shows that the tool isn't too invasive and should work with other extensions.
- It supports templates, tables, images, and citations. A lot of the advanced syntax for MediaWiki is supported.
- It's optional for users. Users can switch to Wikitext any time they're editing a page, and users who don't like WYSIWYG at all can turn it off with a user preference toggle.
I think that this tool has the capability to be the WYSIWYG editor for MediaWiki. The previous effort using Wikiwyg didn't handle most of these points. Jimmy Wales gave an impassioned keynote at Wikimania 2006 about the need for WYSIWYG editing on Wikipedia and elsewhere, and I hope we can use the FCKeditor MediaWiki extension to meet that need.