On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Tisza Gergő <[email protected]> wrote: > It is easy enough to edit for power users, who make the large majority of > edits;
Retention of existing users is not a problem. We don't have to worry that a significant number of dedicated contributors will leave because of a switch to WYSIWYG. They are, by hypothesis, dedicated. On the other hand, new users being reluctant to contribute due to wikitext is a demonstrable and serious problem. I also contest your implication that power users will uniformly or even mostly prefer wikitext to WYSIWYG. I'm a power user by any standard, but I use WYSIWYG wherever possible. Last I heard, by the way, even now most actual *content* is added by occasional contributors. Power users may have more edits, but that doesn't mean they're the most important ones. Of course, I should emphasize that ideally we should keep everyone happy. But making Wikipedia easier to edit for new users is *much* more important than making it easier for established editors. It will *always* be easier for established users to edit than new users, and established editors require a lot less coddling than new editors. > Wikis require a certain hacker mentality > - not in the technical sense, but a desire to understand things in depth. No, they don't. One of the core principles of wikis is eliminating barriers to entry. Ten thousand people who each fix one typo a month are a tremendously valuable resource even if none of them ever contribute more. But many of them will -- *if* you can lure them into making those typo fixes to begin with. Which you can't, if they're scared off by the fixed-width text with random incomprehensible punctuation thrown in everywhere that has no obvious relationship to the article's actual content. > And then there is the ecosystem of bots, gadgets and other third-party tools > which is based on wikitext, and not only would moving away from wikitext a > huge > maintenance burden, but again it would be replaced with something that is way > less intuitive and actually harder to use (simple text operations are somewhat > easier than fooling around with document trees). Are you arguing here that it's easier for *bots* to edit wikitext than XML? Because that seems to be what you're saying, but I don't understand how that would make any sense. Wikitext is unparseable, bots have to resort to fragile regexes and hope they mostly work. > But replacing wikitext with some sort of internal representation that is > unreadable for humans would be a huge mistake IMO. It's not going to happen anytime soon in any case. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
