On 9/18/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I speak as a long-time Wikipedian who is more interested in content than pretty presentation. I had a hand in helping develop the early versions of taxoboxes, and descriptive boxes for battles. To some extent the use of charts and tables is essential for organizing data. But when we reach a point that changing the content of these charts and boxes is a mysterious process for the average user, or when it is only with great difficulty that one even finds what page to edit, then we have to consider the possibility that we have gotten away from the essential principal that this is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
When we speak of Wikipedia as a site that anyone can edit that means more to me than permission. That permission is hollow if a person lacks the techniques to do it. In the earliest time we took pride in the fact that wiki-markup was so simple that anyone could understand it; the essentials could be put on a single page that did not even need to be scrolled. Someone could edit without having to learn html. Can we still honestly say that a retired professor in the arts and humanities is still able to contribute from his vast experience? His familiarity with his subject may be unquestionable, but his expertise preceeded the cyber-age and did not depend on familiarity with computer languages.
I strongly disagree. Our goal here must fundamentally be to produce an encyclopedia for the reader rather than merely to engage in the perpetual process of editing it. Producing a high-quality encyclopedia necessarily means allowing a somewhat more sophisticated set of layout and content presentation tools than the retired professor may be willing to learn -- but this is only a problem insofar as the professor *needs* to learn those tools. Just as we do not expect all users to be equally capable of taking high-quality photographs, writing FAs, or any of a variety of other tasks, we should not expect that all users will be equally capable of working on complex issues of templatized design and layout.
The retired professor, in your example, is most likely here to contribute content rather than to play around with the aesthetics of little colored boxes; the overwhelming majority of his exposure to templates will be either simply including them -- but usually there's no shortage of volunteers to do this anyways -- or using them as black boxes for data, like so
{{Infobox Clown |name= John Smith |born= January 10, 1904 |died= March 22, 1957 |country= United Kingdom }}
There is absolutely no reason, in most cases, for said professor to concern himself with how {{Infobox Clown}} transforms the values he enters into a pretty table; if he's particularly interested in layout issues, he can always ask someone for help if he can't figure things out.
Forcing everyone else to abandon all the sophisticated presentation tools we've developed, meanwhile, will drastically decrease the quality of page layout in the encyclopedia, and won't help the professor in the least, as the nice "black box" template will either be replaced with a fragile table, or nothing at all -- neither of which is something he'll be particularly pleased to work with, I suspect.