Last modified: 2013-02-06 14:43:32 UTC
I'm in the midst of editing a document, and I feel like this process would be much easier if Wiki formatting could be made invisible while editing. It is very difficult to find my place on the page when I transition from the article to the editing screen, and all of the punctuation in the Wiki formatting kind of causes some headaches. I think people would be more patient editors and more successful editors (i.e. they would overlook fewer problems) if Wiki formatting could be made invisible during the editing process. I fully understand the formatting, but when I'm looking exclusively for logical/grammatical/syntactical/punctuation problems, the formatting really poses an unnecessary obstacle. This would also make editing much more approachable for new Wikipedians, who are not yet familiar with the formatting. I think best case scenario would be to default to plain-text editing with a checkbox to turn on Wiki formatting. Is this practical?
This scenario will be fixed by VisualEditor. See https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/12/07/inventing-as-we-go-building-a-visual-editor-for-mediawiki/ and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor for more information, and see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor how to test and use it on English WIkipedia. Note that VisualEditor is still under development and might not work reliably.
