Bj wrote:
I agree that unnecessary markup is... unnecessary. But
there are two
sides of the coin, on one hand we don't want people to have to install
MS Frontpage (or whatever it is called) and have three years web
design experience. But on the other hand, most Wikipedia pages are
rather ugly and boring. They are like just text! I mean who wants to
read four pages of NPOV encyclopedic text where the most interesting
things are the paragraph breaks? :-)
The choice is between information and pretty packaging. If Wikipedia is
going to have any long term reputation it will depend on the
information, not the packaging. Boring is OK. Fixing the boring should
not come at the expense of the primary purpose of the encyclopedia. For
people with slow connections pictures can be a problem. Others who pay
by the on-line second, both to their ISP and the telephone company, may
not appreciate paying to download uninformative pretty pictures.
Furthermore, if we want to appeal to impoverished parts of the world,
we need to take into account the fact that their services are rudimentary.
We're modern people with attention spans measured
in seconds.
This sounds like an argument in favour of dumbing down.
For example, take the Rambot* city pages, how much
better wouldn't
those pages be if their information was presented in a more attractive
way? I have already complained about the lack of pictures, but as that
problem seems to be unsolvable unless someone spends a million dollars
on lawyers researching copyright laws, we have to find other ways to
make the information pretty.
This has nothing to do with lawyers. Perhaps on your next vacation you
can choose an area (one county might be a convenient size), go there
with your digital camera, take pictures of all the little towns in that
area, and submit them to Wikipedia to illustrate those articles.
Problem solved. -- and without a lawyer.
Currently the easiest and only way to make pretty
articles is to use
html. It has the disadvantages that it makes it harder for most
editors to edit articles and someday it might cause severe browser
incompatibilities and problems for disabled users. But isn't that a
problem with all new features?
Huh?
I'll bet someone already has asked themselve how
to edit the table of
contents..
That's easy. Just edit the headings.
. So instead of letting the not so smart people be a
hinderance for
the way of the future lets make them smarter by providing good
documentation and make everything as easy as possible so that everyone
can be happy.
That's an outrageously elitist attitude. The project is not about
making people "smarter", it's about providing information. How are
these "not so smart people" a hinderance anyway? If you think that
better documentation will solve the problems you're welcome to write it.
That should not be difficult unless you are one of the "not so smart
people". ;-)
Ec