> Have you ever looked at the Mediawiki code base? Last time I skimmed a bit, a few years ago, it was an utterly horrible mess of spaghetti PHP. That's basical

> Have you ever looked at the Mediawiki code base? Last time I skimmed a bit, a few years ago, it was an utterly horrible mess of spaghetti PHP. That's basically the problem. They are devoting considerable resources to a GUI editor, and I believe have several paid staff, both programmers and UI/UX experts, dedicated to the project. But as step #1 it needed a rewrite of the horrible-mess-of-regexes parser into some kind of actual semantic parser, which due to the feature-creep of wikitext syntax (which looks nothing at all like a well-behaved programming language syntax) turned out not to be easy going. They commissioned a full usability study in 2010: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Usability_Initiative http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Usability_Init... Here is some information on the parser-rewrite project: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Parsoid And on the visual-editor project: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor