Not sure I understand exactly what you mean Drew (Do you mean parents or plants?). There currently is a barrier to use MediaWiki in that you have to learn wiki text and familiarize yourself with the interface. MediaWiki, WikiPedia, and many in the OpenSource community understand this and are developing next generation editing technologies (as mentioned, the WikiWyg project is most developed
<a href="http://www.wikiwyg.net">http://www.wikiwyg.net</a> ). These editing technologies is supposed to be increasingly WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get). You mentioned that this wouldn't be sufficient Drew. If this is not what you mean, what specifically are the barriers besides making editing more transparent?
<br><br>There are a few things I could imagine that would help Bob Sauer help on the wiki. Streamlining the amount of information presented on any particular page (instead of having mountains of links at the left and top, have drop down lists that simplify presentation of what you can do). We could also integrate the extensions we use into the whatever method we use to edit, whether that be WikiText or WYSIWIG (
e.g., a pop-up box to cite a reference, automatic naming given our conventions, et cetera).<br><br>Sri<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/19/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Drew Endy</b> <<a href="mailto:endy@mit.edu">
endy@mit.edu</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I'm looking for something that my plants could use. Something really
<br>simple. No markup language, wysiwyg, etc.<br><br>Drew<br><br><br>On Jul 19, 2006, at 1:46 PM, M. Yee wrote:<br><br>><br>> Drew,<br>><br>> Not sure if I understand the question. There's an option (in<br>> Wikipedia at
<br>> least) to specify an external editor to edit text. So your favorite<br>> editing application (emacs, vim, etc) can be used. Were you looking<br>> for<br>> something like the editors they have for programming languages like C
<br>> that'll highly open parentheses and whatnot?<br>><br>> Mike Yee<br>><br>><br>> On Wed, 19 Jul 2006, Drew Endy wrote:<br>><br>>> James Anderson of NIGMS asked to inquire about improved text editing
<br>>> interfaces for use with wikis. I.e., instead of our current<br>>> wikimedia "edit" interface is there something that would more readily<br>>> support text editing by folks like Graham Walker and Bob Sauer?
<br>>><br>>> I.e., what's the simplest editing interface for wiki-based text?<br>>><br>>> Also, is there a person or group who is expert on this topic (either<br>>> within OWW or not)? Perhaps a team that is developing still simpler
<br>>> interfaces?<br>>><br>>> _______________________________________________<br>>> OpenWetWare Steering Committee Mailing List<br>>> <a href="mailto:sc@openwetware.org">sc@openwetware.org</a>
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