On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Tisza Gergő <gtisza(a)gmail.com> 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.