Jason Calacanis’ entry on Wikipedia considering adding a WYSIWYG editor to make it easier for people to contribute strikes a chord close to my heart. The argument that a WYSIWYG editor will cause more work for administrators is quite valid – making it easier for people to contribute will mean more contributions that need to be reviewed and checked. On the other hand though, the benefit of a WYSIWYG editor isn’t just that more people will contribute, but that domain experts in fields other than computing will be able to and be more inclined to contribute. For Wikipedia, that’s a pretty huge benefit – the people who know most about a subject will be more likely to actually be writing the Wikipedia article on that subject.

There is a proposal to do a “semi-WYSI” that is what will probably come to Wikipedia. A “semi-WYSI” would have only a handful of features and it would translate the edited text into Wiki markup (as opposed to HTML) for users. A semi-WYSI, or rather a WYSIWYG editor configured to allow just the operations that add value and not those that make articles overly complex, is an excellent compromise between the two viewpoints. Even better, it actually makes it easier for people to learn to use the WYSIWYG editor and get to contributing. Less time is wasted on formatting and more on writing great content. That said, there’s no reason this couldn’t be done with HTML instead of wiki syntax, and the HTML editors are generally better than wiki syntax editors. It’s not like it’s hard to convert wiki syntax to HTML…