User blog comment:Sam1207/Fix the Editor!/@comment-3508190-20120315164623

Wikicode was designed to be easy to learn. It is a lot easier to learn than BBCode. And it is by several orders of magnitude easier than HTML. But for some people supereasy is not quite easy enough. Hence the WYSIWYG editor for wikicode was born.

But there's an inflection point: Making something as easy as wikicode even easier is hard - exceptionally hard. The RTE is a valid attempt in my humble opinion, but it does not try hard enough (yet) and where it falls short it makes things more complicated. That's exacerbated by the fact that the source editor is still around. It's faster than the RTE. It's more reliable than the RTE. It's more flexible than the RTE. And so people switch back and forth between the two editors and the content has to be continuously translated and re-formatted. The source editor is resilient and can handle that. The RTE cannot. And then it breaks.

But ultimately the problem is not the RTE. The real problem is that wikicode doesn't get enough credit for how easy it is. People hear "code" and they think: "Code? Hell no! Not me! Do I look like a programmer?" But you don't have to be a programmer to grok wikicode. You can learn everything you need for writing articles in half an hour or less. Headlines, images, bold text, italics, lists. Period. That's all you really need. Sure, there's advanced stuff but how many people really need and use that? And there's always an advanced user around, isn't there?

Wikicode is easy. That's the message we should spread.

(And I'd still like to know how you can add video to posts!)