[Building Sakai] Rwiki

[Clay Fenlason]

It's an interesting idea to me - because as a reader of user surveys
and faculty feedback I find it so counterintuitive - that there might
be a clamor for wiki markup after we eliminate the need.  We've heard
so many complaints not only about the obscurity of the markup, but
also the *dialect* of choice, that I've assumed any loss negligible.

On the other hand, I know that I myself often short-circuit WYSIWYG
mode in Confluence (and elsewhere) so that I can more precisely
control formatting, e.g. because the WYSIWYG mode is too clumsy to
recognize that I want to close the </b> tag before typing in the next
word, etc. Will a WYSIWYG mode ever be good enough to remove this
need? I hope we can come closer.

I'm not certain that this is the case, but I think the path of least
resistance for a wiki-like tool based on the TinyMCE content authoring
code ( already exhibited at http://3akai.sakaiproject.org ) might rely
upon the versioning native to JCR rather than its own business logic,
in which case the 2 to 3 transition might be smoothed not only as a
matter of the UX, but also the underlying data migration.

~Clay

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 1:40 PM, Charlie
Macchia<cmacchia at brainovision.com> wrote:
> Hi John, let me know if I've got this right.
>
> Are you saying: rather than try to integrate a better WYSIWYG editor on top
> of the current rWiki, instead create a separate wiki like tool, that uses
> tinyMCE as the front end, but isn't strict wiki syntax, yet still maintains
> things like history, versions, alerts etc.
>
> Aside from getting into the plusses and minuses - do I have this right?
>
> Charlie
>
> On 7/17/09 8:18 AM, "John Norman" <john at caret.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> A slightly different tack to consider (posted as an individual and
>> early adopter of wiki) is that the use cases where WYSIWYG is
>> important will be handled by TinyMCE-based page authoring in Sakai 3.
>> However, we don't yet know whether there will be residual demand for
>> "pure" wiki functionality (i.e. using wiki syntax). Perhaps a good way
>> forward might be to consider introducing the page authoring approach
>> in the "content authoring on Sakai 2" demo (http://3akai.sakaiproject.org/dev/
>>   for now) as an *additional* new tool within Sakai 2. The way the
>> technology is presented to users might need to be changed, but in
>> principle it would allow flexible page authoring and conventional wiki
>> to exist side by side and to be used according to the use case/
>> requirements.
>>
>> An advantage of this approach would be smoothing the path from 2 to 3.
>>
>> Cambridge could support such an effort with advice and guidance, but
>> would not be able to commit the resource to make it happen.
>>
>> John
>>
>> On 17 Jul 2009, at 11:48, Adam Marshall wrote:
>
> --
>
>
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-- 
Clay Fenlason
Director, Educational Technology
Georgia Institute of Technology
(404) 385-6644