In Jimmy Wales’ opening keynote for the Wikimania conference, he highlighted the Wikiwyg project for the Wikipedia community. Socialtext’s WYSIWYG editor was released as an open source project late last year. We are collaborating with Wikia to devote resources to make Wikiwyg work on MediaWiki, the open source wiki that Wikipedia runs on.
“My anticipation is that this is a big part of wiki editing and free culture…” said Jimmy Wales. “Wikiwyg, in some shape or form, will be the future of the Internet.”
Ethan Zuckerman covered his talk:
Over the next year, an exciting new development may be Wikiwyg – wysiwyg Media Wiki developed in conjunction with SocialText, which already has wysiwyg functionality. Jimmy believes this is a major priority, citing the story of a high school friend – a brilliant Chinese literature scholar – who was scared off from contributing by the wikitext markup language. While we sometimes think of this complexity as a good barrier to entry, Jimmy says, it’s not. “It’s a barrier to folks who are geeks, but not computer geeks. And it doesn’t keep out the idiots.”
The project still has much work to do, but you can play with an alpha version at http://wikiwyg.wikia.com
After his talk someone asked me, why Socialtext is doing this? After all, MediaWiki could be seen as a competitive open source wiki (it is not, it is optimized for a different use case) and this could be a non-core investment. I see benefits threefold.
One, Wikipedia is the first wiki experience most users have as consumers. Enhancing the initial user experience for wikis supports the long term growth of Socialtext as the enterprise market leader.
Two, by opening up Wikiwyg so others can benefit from the editing platform, we may attract developer contributions.
Three, this is simply good corporate citizenship. Without doubt, the enterprise market benefits from the public works of Wikipedia. Giving back to this community is a no-brainer. I’ve seen the impact Wikiwyg can have on wiki adoption and can’t wait to see this impact more evenly distributed.
But personally, my hope for Wikiwyg is that it helps Wikipedia fulfill the goal of being an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Others who covered Jimmy’s talk: Ethan Zuckerman, Drew, Pete Kaminski, David Weinberger, Meredith, BoingBoing, Cathy, Andy Carvin, Filipino Librarian, Jason Calacanis, Doc
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