How Can Wikipedia's Visual Editor Top Other Word Processors? 196
First time accepted submitter azadnama writes "Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind Wikipedia, is aware of the fact the MediaWiki formatting syntax is a major obstacle for people's participation in writing on the site. To address this problem, the Foundation is developing VisualEditor—a web-based WYSIWYG interface for editing articles. It's supposed to be similar to a word processor, like LibreOffice, Microsoft Word, Pages, Google Docs, and others. And this is the time to ask: What did your word processor get wrong and how can Wikipedia's VisualEditor get it right?"
WYSIWYG Least of the problems... (Score:2, Informative)
Their lack of coherent coding and / or a WYSIWYG editor is the LEAST of WikiMedia / WikiPedia's issues.
Number one issue keeping new blood away: Asshat editors-for-life with "ownership" issues, who park their fat asses on various pages / subjects / media classes, and shit diarrhea on any "newbe" who dares add / change / question so much as punctuation...
Re:It's not about formatting. (Score:2, Informative)
Wikipedia shares your concerns about structured data being indexed in a completely unstructured manner, and they have launched the WikiData (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikidata) project to correct this. In the foreseeable future, your vision of creating lists and infoboxes through a SELECT-like statement will be realized.
Semantic Wikis have also tried to address this problem (http://semantic-mediawiki.org/) but they have suffered from too-tight coupling between pages and the data lying on them.