On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 12:01 PM, Gerard Meijssen<[email protected]> wrote: > Hoi, > At some stage Wikipedia was this thing that everybody can edit... I can not > and will not edit this shit so what do you expect from the average Joe ??
I can not (effectively) contribute to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Commandments_in_Roman_Catholicism Does this mean Wikipedia is a failure? I don't think so. Not everyone needs to be able to do everything. Thats one reasons projects have communities: Other people can do the work which I'm not interested in or not qualified for. Not everyone needs to make templates— and there are some people who'd have nothing else to do but add fart jokes to science articles if the site didn't have plenty of template mongering that needed doing. Unfortunately the existing system is needlessly exclusive. The existing parser function uses solution are so byzantine that even many people with the right interest and knowledge are significantly put off from it. The distinction between this and a general "easy to use" is a very critical one. It's also the case that the existing system's problems spills past its borders due to its own limitations: Regular users need to deal with things like weird whitespace handling and templates which MUST be substed (or can't be substed; at random from the user's perspective). This makes the system harder even for the vast majority of people who should never need to worry about the internals of the templates. I think this is the most important issue, and its one with real usability impacts, but it's not due to the poor syntax. On this point, the template language could be intercal but still leave most users completely free to ignore the messy insides. The existing system doesn't because there is no clear boundary between the page and the templates (among other reasons, like the limitations of the existing 'string' manipulation functions). _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
