I have been working on a commercial wiki project with a friend, and we developed a little visual editor based on WYMeditor. We are releasing it as open-source and I think we had some good ideas on how to make it play nice with the traditional Wikipedia editing.

It’s released on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor
Do you know if others could be interested in it?

Nice blog, BTW

Rod Boothby is running a Read/Write Intranet Idol – it’s a poll I invite you to participate in, so I am attaching it at the bottom.  But first, it gives me a chance to share some of my (wiki)-thoughts.  The list is a mix of industry beh…

It’s nice to get your dream fulfilled fast.  Writing about Socialtext 2.0 in October I wrote:  “My ‘dream setup’ for corporate collaboration: a wiki with an integrated Office 2.0 Suite.” A little later in my post on the JotSpot/Google de…

We actually agree on a number of items.

Backlinks: The point I wanted to make is that they are critical, and kudos for Socialtext and Confluence for supporting it for quite some time. I revised the text (just below the pic) to reflect this better.

Breadcrumbs: I liked them, if they come back, it will be a welcome move. Are they just “hidden” and I can bring them back myself now?

Orphan/new page: it will be great to see enhancements:-)

Hierarchy: I guess I was right suspecting a philosophical difference… but I still don’t see an inflexible, either/or file cabinet type decision. I am simply talking about assuming a default parent / child relationship, which “does not impose a rigid structure, since through through cross-linking we can still have alternate structures, no matter where we create a page.”

The backlinks feature has been present for about a year, it was hidden in the sidebar. So was the breadcrumbs feature, which is even more hidden now, but will come back soon. We were pretty aggressive at pruning for Socialtext 2, and there are a few things we’re planning to add back after first ship, like making the breadcrumbs more visible again.

On new page, there are more ideas, not yet in the product, for making it easy to make new pages that aren’t orphans.

On hierarchy, we see it differently. Grafting traditional hierarchy on a wiki gives you the worst of both worlds. You get the inflexibility of the paper file cabinet, where a file on home insurance needs to be be put either in “insurance/home” or “home/insurance”. Plus, because it’s a wiki, the hierarchical structure isn’t enforced. You don’t have the dictatorial department admin keeping the hierarchy pure. There need to be more ways to create and visualize and create site organization, but adding file cabinet hierarchy isn’t it.

Raju