[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[David Gerard]

On 23 December 2010 10:43, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> 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:

    http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-May/034062.html

"I have to disagree with you given my experience. In one government
department where MediaWiki was installed we saw the active user base
spike from about 1000 users to about 8000 users within a month of having
enabled FCKeditor. FCKeditor definitely has it's warts, but it 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."

    http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-May/034071.html

"Since a plethora of intelligent people with no desire to learn WikiCode
can now add content, the quality of posts has been in line with the
adoption of wiki use by these people. Thus one would say it has gone up.

"In the beginning there were some hard core users that learned WikiCode,
for the most part they have indicated that when the WYSIWYG fails, they
are able to switch to WikiCode mode to address the problem. This usually
occurs with complex table nesting which is something that few of the
users do anyways. Most document layouts are kept simple. Additionally,
we have a multilingual english/french wiki. As a result the browser
spell-check is insufficient for the most part (not to mention it has
issues with WikiCode). To address this a second spellcheck button was
added to the interface so that both english and french spellcheck could
be available within the same interface (via aspell backend)."


The main problem with WYSIWYG on WMF sites is fidelity with the
existing body of wikitext, which has editors exploiting every horrible
edge case you can imagine to get an effect. Tim said a few years ago
that any solution has to account for the existing body of text.

Oh, and that FCKeditor (now CKeditor) in MediaWiki is all but unmaintained ...


- d.