I think it's been long enough that everyone has the idea--topic destickied and moved to the Metaboard.

Woot!

No offense, but it kept doing weird things like not remembering where we last read it from and not turning off the new notifications for the Metaboard despite being up to date with it.

~SE++

Broken thread. Make a new one for the wiki obviously.

Is it possible to get an article wizard like what Wikipedia has or even the sandbox?

Give an example of what you're talking about? I'm not sure I'm positive what you're asking.

The article wizard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox

Ah, thank you, I understand now. Interesting.

Every time I visit Wikipedia I remember how much it ticks me off.

Nevertheless, here, have a sandbox. It's currently ugly as sin because I ganked it from a Mediawiki tutorial so expect its form to mutate somewhat over time, hopefully in the near future.

The tutorial thing... that looks like a lot more work and I'm not convinced of the utility of having it when people can just ask me questions directly on how to do things, and have access to a bunch of existing mediawiki tutorials.

so,when and how often are you online and how quickly will you respond to my questions about thins I don't understand despite reading the tutorial?

I'd just suggest trial and error. It may not look pretty immediately, but the pages can be edited.

~SE++

that's what I've been doing with the sandbox

How many eye rolling emoticons do you plan to include in your questions? That may have an interesting result on my speed of response.

From a cursory glance, I'm seeing next to nothing that the tutorial provides that wouldn't be rendered obsolete within a week of creation. We don't have Wikipedia's rigid structures and crap about not writing articles about yourself and stuff like that that the tutorial needs to explain, and we're going to be dramatically metamorphosing as time goes on simply because lots of different people are going to mobilize the wiki technology for lots of different purposes. To be honest, I can't easily envision a structure even for how something like this could be turned into a useful tool for this wiki. Ever.

If there's some brilliant functionality provided by the tutorial thing that I'm missing, point me to it because I am not seeing it. As of right now, I don't plan on researching this further.

After some digging I think a better way to ask would be..can we have this http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor put in?

I think the function would be avoiding having every user ask the questions over and over instead of being able to read a page or series of pages on the wiki about the wiki that they could be easily sent to via a single link. If something like that were added in, it could be a good asset to the Forum Tips & Tricks thread.

~SE++

@Squinty:

The thing is, from what I'm seeing, the guide is one of the form "Here is how you create a page for x y z particular things." But... there aren't really going to be standard things like that for quite a while, if ever.

I mean, M:EM has some basic page templates that can be used to quickly create new information (although the documentation is, I admit, not great). There might be a few other areas where there's such a close mirroring of information that it makes sense to create similar template pages... but again, that's something that will take time to develop. It wouldn't make sense to dictate that from on high right now, I don't think.

@TS:

Maybe. That project appears to be discontinued so I don't know how well it would mesh with our version of mediawiki, and that backend stuff isn't really my wheelhouse frankly. I'd need to look into it more.

I hear if you say GobO_Welder three times in a row he shows up and does coding.

~SE++

Happily, the backend is my wheelhouse. That plugin is badly outdated and doesn't work at all on our version of mediawiki. Looking at alternative WYSIWY{G,M} editors now, but the options are quite limited.

[edit] You're a funny, funny man, squinty.

I'll be happy with what you can find, since honestly not everyone wants to remember the tags,code, whatever you wanna call it have a page always opened to the long list

All right, let's see what we've got. Looking at all the extensions listed here...

For reference, we're running MediaWiki 1.19.

Extension | Versions Supported | Notes
FCKEditor | ? | Discontinued and no longer available
MeanEditor | 1.14-1.16 | Looks good, but doesn't play nicely with 1.19
TinyMCE MW | tested on 1.20 | HTML-only, can break existing pages, not recommended for use
VisualEditor | 1.23+ | Official; not quite done yet; not supported on 1.19
WikEd | all? | Javascript; works; ugly as sin and not terribly intuitive
WikiEditor | all | Official, stable; doesn't actually do WYSIWYG editing
WYSIWYG | 1.16-1.17 | not supported on 1.19

In my opinion, the best option is to turn WikiEditor on. It basically adds a bunch of stuff to the editing page, augmenting the usual set of formatting buttons (bold, italic, etc.). The easiest way to see what it does is probably to edit a random Wikipedia page. While it doesn't do rich-text editing like the other plugins, it has the large advantage of actually working, and is at least an improvement on the default.

If that's not sufficient, setting up WikEd is the other feasible option. It's not pretty, and I found it a little hard to use, but it is kind of WYSIWYG-ish.

Based on your research, it looks like about the only viable option. Guess its gonna have to work.

~SE++