Comments on: Spoil the user? Why are not always the WYSIWYG Editors the right way?

By: Christoph

Christoph — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 22:21:22 +0000

Christian,

I tend to agree with Ray. A lot of our clients are using Atlassian’s Confluence platform, which is one of the most advanced enterprise wikis these days. In my experience the WYSIWYG editor does facilitate the adoption of the platform, since the user has something at hand with which he is familiar.

The editor is minimalistic but allows the user also to handle links, attachments, tables, images, smileys without inserting any code. Trying to convince end-users that using wiki markup is much faster and easier is in a lot of cases in vain. However, once they have familiarised themselves with the technology a lot of them switch to using wiki markup.

I admit that I adopted this very same strategy when first confronted with Confluence wiki markup, even though I would call myself quite IT literate

Christoph

By: Martin Koser

Martin Koser — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 11:54:40 +0000

Christian,

thanks for the write-up. Yes, this triggered a lot of twitter responses, I guess that's because we've hit a nerve.

From my point of view this stems from a kind of dissatisfaction with WYSIWYG editors, in combination with "not knowing what to do about it".

BTW, I've got another idea for a blog post. Do you remember me and Andi showing you the "namespace concept" of DokuWiki?

This basically adresses another point you mention as confusing: "A wiki is not seldom confusing because of its missing hierarchy."

While advanced users get the emergent nature of wiki structure and like the adaptivity, this really is something that disturbs beginning users.

Here, preparing an "empty structure of stubs and portal pages" can help overcome this barrier, this resembles Stewart Maders concept of "scaffolding" in a way - see http://tinyurl.com/4r5mgm

By: Ray Sims

Ray Sims — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:51:00 +0000

Hi Christian,
Thanks for the write-up. I also read Martin’s post, thanks for pointing to that. I think my ideal is:
a) lightweight is good. WYSIWYG with a minimalist functionality set. Not much more than: bold, italics, links, bullets, numbered-lists, and indents. Perhaps Heading levels. Don’t make wiki into MS Word bloatware.
b) also support wiki mark-up for this minimal set and let the user use either, within same editor.
c) only support additional functionality via HTML and build-in a good separate editor for that
d) upon pasting from MS Word or HTML somehow strip-out all the extra and start out with the minimalist functionality set only…regardless of how the input looked in MS.

I agree with “show” and “educate”, and personally I’ll be using the wiki markup and HTML; however, I just don’t see it as real-world to expect adoption across broad audience when new syntax (no mater how small or easy) is a requirement for basic formating such as creating a bullet-list.

Ray

By: Xavier

Xavier — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 07:20:41 +0000

I’m quite interested by this discussion as well.

I commented alreay on Martin’s blog, as well as on Scott Schnarrs’ one (http://scottschnaars.com/2008/04/10/adoption-wysiwyg-editors/)

I tend to agree with you Christian.

But let’s see what the community thinks about it …

By: Christian Kreutz

Christian Kreutz — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:28:07 +0000

Response to an earlier twitter discussion: Spoil the user? Why are not always the WYSIWYG Editors the right way? http://tinyurl.com/6r4sla