Phototypesetters were typically professionals, therefore not strictly comparable. There is a significant difference to learning a complex system because you are going to earn a living from it, and learning the same system so you can spend your free time doing unpaid work with it. Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of James Salsman Sent: 01 June 2014 05:26 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Increase participation [WAS: The first three weeks]
(non-CS) engineer friends ... upon hitting that edit button, basically went "Gak! No way!"
Wikitext is simpler than what phototypesetter operators in the 1960s-1990s had to deal with, and they had a much better gender balance.
Wikitext resitricts editing to pretty much only "computer science professionals, highly computer-literate professionals (which excludes most of Academia -- have you ever done IT support for a university?), and westerners with enough leisure time to learn it the hard way".
There are abundant counter-examples.
... selects strongly against women.
Where is the evidence that women have more difficulty understanding wikitext than men?
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