Stevertigo wrote:
(1) No WYSIWYG editing system.
Browsers by limitation are not real "WYSIWIG editing systems," and because WP is a website, its nearly entirely dependent on the browser. New functionality, regardless of its development, is mostly either proprietary or useless unless the W3C deals with it. One improvement that comes to mind is text edit fields that are readable and formattable, so the distinction between presentation and editing text is blurred - maybe quick shifting between edit and view modes.
Nevertheless, there are a number of WYSIWYG editing technologies that people have developed which work with web browsers, such as FCKEditor. A number of non-Mediawiki wikis already have WYSIWYG functionality, as does Google's Knols project.
I know people who have tried developing WYSIWYG for Mediawiki, and the main obstacle they encounter is the wiki markup language, which is too idiosyncratic to parse properly and consistently. If Mediawiki used some other markup syntax, such as XML or HTML, they'd be able to do it. The current syntax was designed with the original intention of making it very easy and quick for people to edit articles and add formatting such as bold, italic, hyperlinks, etc. However, even a lightweight markup language is still a markup language, and WYSIWYG is easier for most people, so in this regard Wikipedia has fallen behind with regard to state-of-the-art standards for user-friendliness. Moreover, the original simplicity of Wikipedia's markup syntax has been lost somewhat as new functionality has been added. The whole templates mess is an example of this.
If someone were trying to design Wikipedia from scratch today, I think they'd be able to come up with a markup syntax that supports WYSIWYG very nicely, but of course designing it from scratch is not an option. There's too much legacy material that has already been created using the existing syntax, so changing it becomes very difficult. Again, this is en example of path dependency.
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SHELDON RAMPTON Research director, Center for Media & Democracy Center for Media & Democracy 520 University Avenue, Suite 227 Madison, WI 53703 phone: 608-260-9713
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Sheldon Rampton wrote:
There's too much legacy material that has already been created using the existing syntax, so changing it becomes very difficult. Again, this is en example of path dependency.
Or rather, the retort a dozen years on to Ward Cunningham and "what's the simplest thing that would actually work", "well, what do we do if it works?" Your argument seems to me not so much about path-dependency, which I would say relates more to the social side of WP, but to the oldest jokes: "If I wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here".
As far as templates are concerned, we could start in on deprecation for technical reasons and try to improve the worst of it - sounds OK to me and still within the "wiki way".
I'm not yet convinced that the absence of WYSIWYG is a barrier to WP doing anything specific, and I don't believe that the usability studies I have seen prove that it is. But then I tend to believe that the issue with expository problems lies in the underestimation of expository writing.
Charles