On 23 December 2010 10:55, David Gerard <[email protected]> wrote: > On 23 December 2010 10:43, Tony Sidaway <[email protected]> wrote: > >> To clarify my skepticism, the complexity of Wikipedia doesn't arise at >> the user interface level at all but at the level of social >> interaction. This is unavoidable because you're dealing with other >> human beings, not a machine. The complexity is necessary, even >> desirable, for exactly the same reason. > > > True. However, the markup is really an important way to put off the > n00bs. People who are used to wikitext don't believe it, and say "but > I'd think that XXX" - but here's the data point: >
You've convinced me. This in particular: > > "[CKEditor] very closely matches the experience non-technical people have > gotten used to > while using Word or WordPerfect. Leveraging skills people already have > cuts down on training costs and allows them to be productive almost > immediately." For me WYSIWYG is synonymous with annoying stuff that gets in the way of the code I want to write, and of course I take it as read that the code stands for a procedural or functional abstraction of what the computer is supposed to do. I don't find it difficult, but then I've been doing it since I was in the lower sixth at school when I had to type computer instructions on a teletype connected to a land line by acoustic coupler. Not everybody works that way. Most of us don't. To those people the buttons I find annoying may be the only thing they *do* understand, they're the most accessible way of using a computer, and a user interface lacking those buttons is alien and incomprehensible. With the buttons, these people are intuitively able to produce a reasonable minimal subset of tasks immediately as long as the result of their work is displayed immediately (WYSIWYG). It's still annoying, though. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
