The Longest Now

A blog has been started on the Wikimedia Meta-wiki to cover
Wikimania.  The first posts have been made by yours truly, but
expect more to come from other conference attendees.  The content
there will have much more detail about the nuances and trivia of
conference organization and late-night jam sessions; so look there to
satisfy your Need for Mania.   Please excuse the lack of RSS
feeds for that specific page; this is one of the issues we will be
talking about during the hacking days this week.

Wikimania Blog started on Meta-Wiki …

In a recent interview (last fall), Ward Cunningham
highlighted the most pressing unresolved problem with wikis : the lack
of a simple and familiar editing interface for most users.  Asked
what one thing he would change about Wikipedia, he said immediately, “I’d put a WYSIWYG editor in front of it.“

Since then, no progress has been made towards changing the default editor for Wikipedia or for MediaWiki in general.  But discussions today with non-MediaWiki developers at the start of Wikimania’s Hacking Days
suggest that modern web-based WYSIWYG editors are becoming fairly
mature and fast, and are certainly reasonable as interface options, if
not as the default option, for wiki users.

Day 1 of the Wikimania was a definite success.  Everyone arrived
and found their way to the hostel (and, in Achal’s case, the hotel)
without incident; the hackers self-assembled to a midday start, and in
the process of discussing the first day’s topic, hacked out a first draft of a metadata solution.

After the day’s talks, and after what seemed like a fine dorm-style
meal, there were many good, quiet discussions and a viewing of Pi. Eugene and Sven and I talked about the active disinterest in HtmlArea
by Wiki programmers, including many of our friends.  Without my
mentioning my interview with Ward Cunningham, Eugene commented that
Ward probably wouldn’t feel strongly about it. 
   
When I pointed out that, in fact, Ward had twice listed “lack of WYSIWYG
editors”  as the greatest remaining barrier to the general public
using wikis, Eugene was surprised, and commented that nobody had blogged
about it.  Which was true!  Mea maxima culpa.

So, I’m going to blog about it now; better late than never.