And while I like the experience of editing in Luminotes, there are also some things missing that come with the standard edit-save cycle like comparing versions (diffs) of pages – but, well, perhaps I didn’t find it?

In my experience most people argue against wiki markup from the experience of a try at editing a Wikipedia article – and Mediawiki markup is seriously limited (to say it very friendly). This problem of “oh no, it’s code” needs to be tackled with easy and powerful WYSIWYG editors in time, Luminote sure is an interesting thing to watch.

WYSIWYG editors, for all their faults, have the ability to do away with this cumbersome edit/save cycle completely. You just edit your page directly (ideally with some good key combinations in order to approach the speech with which you can enter formatted text with traditional markup).

So I actually tried to tackle the problem of making a decent, simple, fast WYSIWYG wiki editor. The result is called Luminotes, and you can check it out at http://luminotes.com/

Let me know what you think.

Der siebte Wikimanagement-Erfolgsfaktor lautet "Einfachheit in der Nutzung".Manchmal sagt ein Bild ja mehr als tausend Worte:Die Graphik stammt übrigens von Erik Burke. Erstmals gesehen habe ich die Graphik übrigens bei frogpond.de…

Oh, and in relation to wiki markup: I am not a geeky IT guy either, but perhaps I have the (dis-)advantage of long-time acquaintance with plain text editors in wikis – starting with wikis in 2001 I had no choice

This being said, I haven’t had any reluctance towards wiki markup since I haven’t shown any.

And this for a simple and stupid reason; I don’t know it myself! ;o)

I’m a (geeky) Marketing guy, not an IT one … ;o)

By the way, do you know XWiki? If yes, may I ask what you think about it?

This makes for another 2 cents:
- recruit people (wiki promoters) that explain, coach and “walk the talk” – preferably senior people

Basically, this leads me back to another thought me and Andreas were developing at re:publica: Stewart Mader includes WYSIWYG as an adoption pattern (http://tinyurl.com/6dgfvf) but in fact we may also see this as an anti-adoption pattern, with the basic fix being the offering of both ways.

Let me add 2 cents of advice:

- show don’t tell – show them how easy one can edit and contribute to wiki pages
- show them that even with a WYSIWYG editor there’s no way to just copy-paste documents from Word files (and that these are completely different approaches, documents ain’t wiki pages and vice versa)
- ask hard questions – is this reluctance towards wiki markup based upon a mere sentiment, some kind of research or is it only a polite way of saying “we don’t want this, now go away”

I agree that this seems to be a hard sell, but I have seen people and companies who are using different wikis – without html editor – really successfully. And we consultants, whether we’re working internally or are called in to help with some issues, need to ask these hard questions – all to help companies get the most out of wikis and other social software.

On the other hand I know that people expect a “Word editor”.

My colleaques are 30 – 40 yrs old and open minded. I’m curious how this little project will do…

I am currently on the lookout for a wiki (and possibly blogging platform) solution to use internally at the company I work for, and I can tell you that I already have a hard time to bring people to realize and accept that a wiki is not some sort of geeky and complicated thing. If the wikis I’m showing them were to have wiki mark up only, they’d run away calling me a fool.

This being said, I do agree with you on the fact that the WYSIWYG interface has to be really simple, in order to avoid what you quite well described; people spending more time on layout than on content …