On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 3:51 AM, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
On 23 December 2010 11:48, Tony Sidaway tonysidaway@gmail.com wrote:
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.
Yeah. It won't be a happener on WMF sites, I think, until WMF has money to throw at developers to develop something that actually works and has fidelity with wikitext as it's used. This is a *big and hairy* problem that interested parties have been dashing their foreheads against for *years*.
Right.
The social stuff which is complex is something which is a barrier, but one that all western society members who are modern communications literate are fundamentally equipped to handle. Some will fail at it but you really just need to be good at electronic communications, functionally literate, and social enough to handle basic give and take discussions.
Very few people master the markup; very many fewer than that can hack or understand the underlying code. I'm a coder; I've dived into the MW parser on and off, and other parts of it, to understand functional behaviors better. But I also do outreach and computer training at times, and most normal people could never approach that level, and find wiki markup onerous when I ask them about it...