On 23 December 2010 10:55, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 23 December 2010 10:43, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@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:
You've convinced me. This in particular:
"[CKEditor] 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."
For me WYSIWYG is synonymous with annoying stuff that gets in the way of the code I want to write, and of course I take it as read that the code stands for a procedural or functional abstraction of what the computer is supposed to do. I don't find it difficult, but then I've been doing it since I was in the lower sixth at school when I had to type computer instructions on a teletype connected to a land line by acoustic coupler.
Not everybody works that way. Most of us don't. To those people the buttons I find annoying may be the only thing they *do* understand, they're the most accessible way of using a computer, and a user interface lacking those buttons is alien and incomprehensible. With the buttons, these people are intuitively able to produce a reasonable minimal subset of tasks immediately as long as the result of their work is displayed immediately (WYSIWYG).
It's still annoying, though.