WYSIWYG is an acronym for "What You See Is What You Get". It is used to describe an editing technique or software that allows users to graphically alter the attributes of their document as they type, and see the the changes occur in place, immediately.

Almost all modern "word processors" such as Open Office Writer and Microsoft Word are WYSIWYG packages. If a user wants text to be bold, then they can either click the Bold icon and start typing, or select the text they want and then click the icon to transform this. The alternative is a 'marked up' language, such as HTML where to see text in bold it must be placed inside mark-up tags, e.g. , < b > text < / b >. The only way to see this change applied is to render the document to see the final version.

There is some debate about whether WYSIWYG editing on the WWW is a true application of the technique as each Browser renders the content slightly differently depending on it's internal implementation of W3C rules to display the page. However, these are slowly converging and as time passes the changes will become smaller.

What WYSIWYG does give is a rich set of features to less experienced internet users and this increases their confidence in using tools and increases their willingness to contribute.