[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Stephanie Daugherty]

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 7:40 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> There's various levels here, all of which need to be removed:
>
> * What doesn't fit on a single-page printed cheat sheet isn't basic.
> * What doesn't fit in a pop-up box on a single screen isn't basic.
> * What doesn't fit in a line under the edit box isn't basic.
> * Wikitext isn't basic unless you assume HTML, which you can't.
>
> Wikitext is however powerful, and there are 160,000 editors in any
> given month on en:wp who cope with it. But that's a drop in the ocean.
>
> Moving in the right direction. If we did this to articles, but not to
templates, we'd at least have the confusing parts "contained" in their own
little "magic black box"  (or green box, or however else you want to express
a template in the editing interface.). We could reasonably get that down to
Section tags, emphasis tags, table tags, image tags, hyperlinks, lists, and
template transclusions, plus the nowiki and comment functions. Some may
argue, but everything else is superfluous to editing an article, or could be
wrapped up nice and neat as a template to hide the "deep magic" of wikitext
from the layperson.

-Steph