Rich text editor for MediaWiki - beta planned for early next year

[Chris Watkins]

Good news on the rich text editor. I'd heard that it was taking a long time to develop a good one because of the challenges of handling templates, right-to-left scripts, musical and mathematical notation and the like. But it looks like a usable version isn't so far off.

I know there's CKeditor, but it's only partway there in terms of usability, and it makes changes to the wikitext (adding HTML tags and capitalizing links).

Gardner reiterates call to close the gender gap

This week Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, discussed with news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) the importance of attracting more female editors to the site. At present only one in ten editors is thought to be female, a trend highlighted repeatedly by the Foundation as a cause for concern. Gardner told the agency that women have different interests than men, and to ensure that the quality of Wikipedia is not compromised by gaps in coverage, it is necessary for Wikimedia's websites to attract more women. She pressed the idea of a rich text editor to enable those without knowledge of wiki syntax to edit more easily, explaining that a beta phase of the software should be made available to "experienced Wikipedia users" by early next year. A full roll-out of the software "need[s] to be developed in collaboration with the editing community and [the Foundation] aspire[s] to achieve consensus", she said. She also noted that efforts to attract new editors will not specifically target woman, that any attempt to attract editors will have to be a "general outreach" achieved by creating "an environment where people want to help."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2011-12-12/In_the_news

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Chris Watkins

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