VisualEditor

Could we use this as a editor on our wiki? In my opinion it’s soo much better than current editor.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor

I’d rather have the Wikimedia Foundation do the rollout on their own wikis first and wait how well that works.

All right, but i think it would be great if users have an option to use alternative editor like that one… Just like we select out prefered map editor…

And… is that even possible?

What you can do is to enable users to make use of different mediawiki gadgets:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets
I’m not spotting the VE that much to say, if it’s just some kind of gadget, that we can offer, but not making it mandority for everybody.

I understand the problem, that the usual MW editor is quiet ugly and doesn’t assist that much on editing the wiki. I expect that the VE can help beginners to start contributing more easily (WYSIWG, rich formating, …). On the other hand I know that much wiki-magic, that an JS editor just can’t reflect/visualize correctly and I expect that the editor (at least at this stage) will break some pages. On a lot of OSM pages, we make use of templates, which only a few of us know, maybe we need to improve that, too or offering wiki editing training via webcasts?

hmm… What about mirrored osm wiki with VE enabled just for testing if it would break anything? or… We could make umm… (i don’t know what) that would just disable VE if there would be any element on the page that it don’t support… eg templates… but that would mean every page. ;D

I appreciate your engagement to contribute to our wiki :slight_smile:

But please reflekt the priority of our wiki: In the OSM context it is just a tool and not the core element of our project. So personally I believe, that we shouldn’t spend to much energy on testing/fixing new wiki technologies. That is the focus of the Mediawiki community.
My impression is, that currently VE isn’t well tested enough. Basically that is the reason, why it’s not shipped to the local wikipedias. But call me wrong.
Maybe an server admin should say a few words what he thinks about this new component and how he can integrate it in a save way.

Maybe you should have a look at https://translatewiki.net, they make use of a lot nice (well tested) extensions to simplify the wiki editing. Maybe some of them would help the OSM wiki as well.

Last but not least I like to encourage you to have a look at the current Mediawiki syntax. It’s not that hard to learn the basic steps and usually you don’t have to code a whole farm of templates at the beginning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wiki
Just start with a few edits on your user page and feel free to ask any time the wikiteam, if you don’t know how to express something with the syntax :slight_smile: