2010/12/30 Neil Kandalgaonkar <ne...@wikimedia.org> > On 12/29/10 7:26 PM, Tim Starling wrote: > > > Making editing easier could actually be counterproductive. If we let > > more people past the editing interface barrier before we fix our > > social problems, [...] > > This is an interesting insight! >
Yes it's really interesting and highlighting! I'm following another talk about StringFunctions; and I recently got an account into toolserver (I only hope that my skill is merely sufficient!). In both cases, there's an issue of "security by obscurity". I hate it at beginning, but perhaps such an approach is necessary, it's the simplest way to get a very difficult result. So, what's important is, the balance between simplicity and complexity, since this turns out into a "contributor filter". At the beginning, wiki markup has been designed to be very simple. A very important feature of markup has been sacrificed: the code is not "well formed". There are lots of simple, but ambiguous tags (for bold and italic characters, for lists); tags don't need to be closed; text content and tags/attributes are mixed freely into the template code. This makes simpler their use but causes terrible quizzes for advanced users facing with unusual cases or trying to parse wikitext by scripts or converting wikitext into a formally well formed markup. My question is: can we imagine to move a little bit that balance accepting a little more complexity and to think to a well formed wiki markup? Alex _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
