Long day at Wikimania Hacking Days. Phillip Hallam-Baker gave a good talk about the importance of identity in the wiki community. David Recordon talked about OpenID, and I got to demo the OpenID MediaWiki extension. That was all pretty fun.
But the hard part has been discussing WYSIWYG editor stuff. We're in a real bind with MediaWiki -- a complicated and almost non-deterministic text markup language with one (1) complete implementation and an estimated 5 million documents in various places on the Web. The challenge is to keep storage in Wikitext but editing in-browser with HTML. The marshalling between the two formats is so tricky to do, and the consequences in damaging documents so large, that it's almost impossible to make the project work.
Meanwhile, wiki companies like JotSpot, WetPaint, and SocialText have WYSIWYG editors, and it's starting to look like MW will never have it. It's probably time to just bite down and do this job.
Frederico Caldeira Knabben of FCKeditor has come to Boston to offer his help. The guys from Wikia are working on using WikiWyg, which would be pretty cool, too. I just think it has to happen.
tags: hacking days wikimania identity openid wysiwyg fckeditor