Posted on Mar 26, 2007 12:00:00 AM | SamePage Team | 2 Comments
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You will find a bunch of open source wikis in Wiki Matrix - probably one starting with every alphabet - TWiki, ZWiki, XWiki and it goes on. While there is little doubt that the wiki concept is amazing, it is also pretty obvious that wikis must be a brainchild of some IT geek who thought "__bold text__" would be fairly intuitive way of saying make this text bold. No offense to Ward Cunningham or the other Wiki Gurus out there. But lets accept it - if we really want to open the powerful world of wikis to the rest of the non-tech savvy population, we need to make it really simple and intuitive for them. This is one of the main reasons why we have focussed so much on the WYSIWYG Editor of SamePage.
The other day, we asked one of the PR guys to update a table on Wikipedia to put our entry in it. When he clicked on "Edit this Page", horror of horrors, he saw something that looked like this:
{| cellspacing="0" class="sortable wikitable" style="border: darkgray solid 1px; width: 100%"
|- style="background: #cccccc;"
! style="width: 140px" | Wiki farm
! style="width: 100px" | Price !! Features !! Wiki engine
! style="width: 80px" | Content license
|-
!style="background: #ececec;"| @wiki [http://atwiki.com]
| Free, has ads
| [[WYSIWYG]] editing, selectable edit-mode (WikiText or WYSIWYG or text), multi-language support (English, Chinese and Korean), access control, file uploads, importing, full-text search, and[[RSS]] abilities.
| Custom
|
|-
It took me a while to explain to him that all those weird looking characters is part of what is known as wiki syntax and for some weird reason , we IT folks believe that it is more intuitive than HTML. Lets face it, guys. Whom are we kidding ? This is the world where Microsoft Word has been around for a decade. Do we really expect Wikis to take off if we expect the rest of the world to learn this new geek language ? People are used to clicking buttons and icons that will hide all the complicated syntax and do all the dirty work for them. Any Wiki that does not offer superior WYSIWYG editing capabilities is practically useless for the non-techie crowd.
True, it can be a bit scary for new users to see a new editor with too many buttons and icons. That is one of the main reasons why we built the Simple and Advanced options in our editor toolbar. So a user coming for the first time sees a simpler version of the toolbar - that should take care of most common editing needs - changing the format, inserting images or links , spellcheck, bullets etc
And in case he is an advanced user he simply clicks on the >> icon in the end of the toolbar to effectively expand his toolbar to provide all the buttons and icons provided by SamePage. There is an entire row of table specific operations because anyone who has done table editing knows how important it is to have features like sort the table or merge cells or copy a row. The toolbar always remembers your last chosen option.
And the best thing is that while the end-user keeps working on this WYSIWYG Editor, the tool generates standard HTML at the back-end. You can check that anytime by clicking on the <> button to check out the HTML source. This ensures that the final result is always in a standard format - after all to this day there is no real standard for Wiki Syntax, is there??
Tags : Rationale for a feature
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2 comments so far ( Post your own )
- 2
On Feb 06, 2008 05:35:31 PM
SamePage Team
wrote:
Thanks for your feedback.
Yes, we agree. While a WYSIWYG editor is almost a must-have for 90% of the users, there are probably a lot of early wiki adopters who may be comfortable with wiki syntax . That is the reason we do support both WYSIWYG and Wiki syntax. Check out our support knowledgebase (http://support.etouch.net) on how to use wiki syntax in SamePage.There are some limitations of course - but the product is targeted in allowing the vast majority of people who do not know any wiki syntax to collaborate efficiently.
The reason for storing in HTML is simply because that is a better standard to adhere to - rather than wiki syntax which does not have any standards so far.
- SamePage Team- 1 On Feb 06, 2008 11:53:10 AM guest wrote:
No, but you should be able to edit an entire page in the software's native WikiText. The HTML is a nice touch, but largely unnecessary. The fact that SamePage doesn't allow you to edit the entire page - as entered - with Wiki Text is a major shortcoming.
Let's face it - when migrating from other wikis or using Wiki features, having to live in the WYSIWYG / MS WORD style editor is VERY inefficient. The tool should be smart enough to allow both types of users to collaborate. SamePage is just as guilty as the all WikiText wikis - you've just gone too far on the WYSIWYG side so as to cripple those who are comfortable with Wiki. There should be a blend between the two. - 1 On Feb 06, 2008 11:53:10 AM guest wrote:
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