ENG Wikisym2008: WYSIWYG & Wiki Editors

WikiSym 2008

Wiki EditorsFrom Wiki Markup To WYSIWYG And Spatial Wikis

WikiSym 2008: wiki markup, WYSIWYG and Spatial Wikis

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Observations

• Novice users often need assistance with wiki markup.

• About half of “collaborative edits” is created to fix up markup.

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Observations

• There is a plenty of wiki markup syntaxes, each of them requires some additional work to get used to.

• Wiki Creole project is finished after two years of development, ’08 session was pretty same as ‘07

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http://www.wikicreole.org/

http://www.wikicreole.org/


Observations

• There was even some side talks on introducing WYSIWYG into Wikipedia.

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Conclusions

• Wiki markup have reached its limits and about to stagnation.

• WYSIWYG seems to be close future for editing text in wikis.

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Implementing WYSIWYGWiki Markup, Shoo Away!

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Stage I“Two In One”

• Wiki & HTML editors are both supported simultaneously

• User can switch editor during edit, with possible minor loss of markup (such as complex tables from HTML)

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Stage II“WYSIWYG”

• Default editor — WYSIWYG

• Support team should work on conflict situations to find missing features and fix issues with transition from wiki markup to WYSIWYG.

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Are You Scared?

Wiki Markup

WYSIWYGeditor

You a

re

here

If you find over-decorated pages — feel free to fix them.This is wiki after all!

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Next Station

WikiMarkup

WYSIWYGeditor

SpatialWiki

You

are h

ere

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How’s “Spatial” Look Like?

Sample image from Tinderbox software

Current state of spatial software is most appropriate from collaborativeMind-Mapping.

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Spatial Wiki Samples

• ShyWiki — wiki engine capable to compose pages as spatial collection of text and image blocks

• Tinderbox — standalone Mind-Mapping software

• Socs — research project for social network visualization for Wikipedia community

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On WikiWord Linking

• There is no known solution for inflexion problems with WikiWords(which is actual for Slavic languages)

• WikiName: a short address or a brief title?

• WYSIWYG is not well suited for WikiWords detection & linking as you type them

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Linking Outside

• Links to issues from bugtrackers (JIRA)

• Links to people pages (in some social networks)

• Other “inter-wiki” stuff, which is used in encyclopedias mostly

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Obvious Solution:Auto Complete!


• Easy to implement in WYSIWYG

• Common interface for all kinds of links

• Helps fight typos & inflexions

• Allows to provide additional information on link target while linking

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Next Actions

• After WYSIWYG implementation we plan to add autocomplete-based link creation supporting not only links to other wiki pages, but a bugtracker issues, people links, etc.

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Table Issues

• Table-related issues are common to intranet wikis.

• Current wiki-engines don’t focus much on issues with tables.

• WYSIWYG helps sometimes, but does not cover all the issues.

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Markup Tables

• low on cell amount

• rich markup inside cells

• WYSIWYG is the most effective tool

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Data Tables

• Zounds of simple-decorated cells, often only numbers inside.

• MS Excel is used for data preprocessing frequently.

• Convenient to store as .XLS files.

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Next Actions

• Files should be uploaded from the edit screen (from WYSIWYG toolbar?)

• Uploading a file leads to insertion its contents into page

• XLS/CSV-files should be inserted as tables, not “download” links.

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Future Investigation

• There was some talks on successful WebDAV integration on the conference.

• We plan to investigate, how we can organize access to wiki through some kind of “network drive” interface, so user can open attached file in his preferred table processor, make changes and simply save the file.

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So• WYSIWYG is going to replace wiki markup

• Autocomplete should be used to handle linking instead of WikiWords

• Big data-oriented tables should be treated as XLS-files.

• Spatial Wiki — young but interesting technology that can replace WYSIWYG sometimes. Not now.

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Authors and contributors• Nikolay Yaremko

[email protected]

• Konstantin [email protected]

and other WikiSym participants

More WikiSym 2008 stories?http://wikisym2008.humanemagica.com

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