A couple years ago we decided to use MediaWiki for a wiki implementation at work. Wikipedia uses MediaWiki for their wiki application so we felt it was the right choice for our needs. One concern my team had was that MediaWiki didn't come with a rich text editor (no WYSIWYG).
While a number of us may be fine with using wikitext or HTML to edit our wiki pages, I believe the majority in any organization prefers to edit their pages with a friendly user interface similar to that found on their word processor. At the time, we tried a number of solutions but found neither the suggested TinyMCE or FCKeditor implementation integrated that well with mediaWiki. So for our project we settled with wikEd, an editor that still required users to work with wiki syntax but surprising a very good tool for most users.
During a lunch conversation last week with Deane Barker of Gadgetopia and Blend Interactive, I mentioned my frustrations with MediaWiki not having available a good WYSIWYG solution. Deane suggested that I look at a more recent implementation of MediaWiki plus FCKeditor. This project is being supported by the developers of FCKeditor themselves.
After several attempts to provide a WYSIWYG interface for MediaWiki,
we at FCKeditor have decided starting a dedicated project for it,
aiming to propose a definitive solution for it.The main criticism again such kind of integration is that rich
text editors produce HTML code, and MediaWiki runs with Wikitext. We
prioritized this problem when developing this prototype and our
FCKeditor integration now produces Wikitext, satisfying this need.
Within a couple days after that lunch, we replaced wikEd in our wiki with FCKeditor. The implementation is rather new for our wiki users, but I can already hear a sigh of relief from them. If you have been looking for a good WYSIWYG solution in mediaWiki this FCKEditor solution is likely the best solution to be found. My thanks to Deane for suggesting we take a look at this rich text editor solution for MediaWiki!
Comments
It is not robust
Actually I tried it in an enterprise which there exist around 1000 articles in its Mediawiki wiki. But I should confess it was not successful . Actually I used it in a bilingual Persian/English environment an it may make things more complex but anyway the editor could generate non suitable markups or generate it at non suitable places.There is also probably some CSS conflict with the Mediawiki itself (fonts grow larger with this extension added. It also sometimes cause disorder in the code behind. That's a pity because I believe the existence of a wysiwyg editor would persuade times of more contributors .
I've found that for those
I've found that for those people who never really learned MediaWiki's wiki syntax...really do like the FCKeditor extension. However, those that know the syntax very well...usually turn off the rich text editor. I'm somewhere in the middle.
I can see though, where the FCKeditor/Mediawiki integration could cause problems...especially in multi-lingual sites such as the one you're working on.