Extension:MeanEditor

MeanEditor is a lean-and-mean WYSIWYM (notice the M) editor based on WYMeditor. It is meant to complement traditional editing, instead of implementing the full Mediawiki language. It integrates with the current (1.13) release of Mediawiki. We plan to propose the patch for integration in the Mediawiki core.

It provides non-technical and inexperienced users a way to contribute to a wiki while being:
 * easy to use
 * history-friendly
 * fair to existing hand-written code and edits
 * semantically correct, encouraging correct use of markup

Rationale
Advanced users and administrators do not need a visual editor. They just need it not to interfere with the code they already know and love. Moreover, expressing the full wikitext syntax in a visual editor is probably impossible.

We focused on the "easy", non technical, parts of a wiki. We estimate that a lot of Wikipedia content consists of simple paragraphs of text with links, references, images and a little formatting. This is where inexperienced editors can provide valuable contributions with little effort.

Usage cases
We designed MeanEditor with existing wikis (above all, Wikipedia) in mind. We hope the existing communities will find MeanEditor a good tool they can trust, rather than find annoying.

If no advanced features are needed, MeanEditor is a good choice even for a single-editor wiki.

The patch
MeanEditor requires a patch to EditPage.php. The patch adds XHTML input support. The current CustomEditor hook requires one to duplicate most (if not all) of EditPage.php; we believe that a patch is a much cleaner solution. Existing extensions either require custom patches or are written in JavaScript;.

As soon as we have sorted out some details, we'll propose the patch to the Mediawiki developers. By now, you have to download and manually apply the patch from http://allievi.sssup.it/jacopo/MeanEditor/EditPage.patch.

cd /var/www/mediawiki wget http://allievi.sssup.it/jacopo/MeanEditor/EditPage.patch patch < EditPage.patch

If patch asks for a filename, EditPage.php is the one. The patch should apply cleanly, write us if you see errors or warnings.

Installation

 * 1) Install Mediawiki 1.13 in /var/www/mediawiki
 * 2) Patch EditPage.php (see above)
 * 3) Unpack http://allievi.sssup.it/jacopo/MeanEditor/MeanEditor.tgz in /var/www/mediawiki. This will create the jquery, wymeditor and extensions/MeanEditor directories.
 * 4) For image support: Disable $wgHashedUploadDirectory following the steps suggested in LocalSettings.php
 * 5) Add the following to LocalSettings.php:

NOTE: If you wish to install in another subdirectory or enable short paths, you will have to replace  as needed in wymeditor/jquery.wymeditor.pack.js (we plan to fix this soon).

Of course, /var/www</tt> is an example for your website root directory (DocumentRoot</tt>).

Details
MeanEditor is best described as "A quick and dirty hack with a couple of interesting properties". It supports only a very limited subset of the wiki language, but does its job right. (Well, it tries)

It is an adaptation of WYMeditor, a semantic editor for strict XHTML. This encourages users to think in terms of what they mean, instead of trying to change what they see.

MeanEditor refuses to modify markup it does not understand and strives to preserve the original page intact. Ideally, edits made with MeanEditor should be indistinguishable from manual edits. If anything, a visual editor for Wikipedia should not create additional work for administrators.

In the current version, redundant whitespace is sometimes removed and some characters are replaced with numerical entities. Other than that, MeanEditor leaves a very clean diff.

Supported markup
This list should certainly grow, but not indiscriminately. We feel wiki community should decide what should be implemented in the visual editor and what should be left out.

Right now we support

 * Headlines (== and ===)
 * Division in paragraphs
 * Page- and text-style wikilinks
 * [url] and [url text]-style external links
 * Images (with easy selection of recently uploaded images) with default positioning
 * Simple lists (no nesting)
 * Bold and italic
 * References (currently read-only)

To be implemented

 * Better reference support
 * Categories
 * Recognition of significant whitespace (i.e. code sections)
 * A way to specify image position and size
 * Preserving original code whitespace to leave a very clean diff (but some changes may be desirable, check what current bots automatically correct)
 * Make "Magic" links like http://www.example.com clickable?
 * Standard bibliography
 * LaTeX formula editing (TODO: just edit the LaTeX code? Or MathML for visual editing?)

To be implemented only for display

 * Templates

Known Bugs

 * Squeezes multiple newlines in one, does not preserve redundant whitespace (again, this may be a good thing)
 * The Javascript code has hardcoded page and image URLs. Also, for some functions, URLs are shown in the interface. It will still need polishing.
 * Requires $wgHashedUploadDirectory</tt> to be off (should be easy to solve)
 * Context dialog doesn't work if you change selection (should it?)
 * Unsupported feature detection is simply draconic
 * Unnecessarily escapes characters like tilde in URLs and converts HTML entities (WYMeditor or browser problem?)
 * Unicode handling is untested
 * Preview passes HTML to the editor. We try to convert it to wikicode as soon as possible, but some hooks or preview functions may be confused.
 * If you are in the middle of a visual editing and something strange happens, we revert to traditional editing. There might be cases in which you get HTML instead of wikicode and have to start over. This should be a very rare case, but existing extensions need reviewing.

Security
Saved text passes through usual Mediawiki checks.

However, it might be possible to create a malicious page in wikitext and have MeanEditor create dangerous HTML. Our regular expressions are simple, but they should be carefully reviewed before deploying.

Future?
Right now MeanEditor does not use the Mediawiki parser. This is what ensures MeanEditor doesn't do silly things with markup it does not understand.

We recognize our simple regular expressions will ultimately become too limited. A good solution would be to integrate an "editor mode" in the parser. The "editor mode" should generate semantic XHTML targeted to a WYSIWYM editor.