Hoi,
Given the limited group of people working on the development of mediawiki,
the biggest effort has so far been in maintaining the quality and the
scalability of the software. As the funding has been really limited, you
will find that much of the work on usability has been in the functionality
of the templates, the way files like soundfiles and movies are supported and
also in the way languages are supported in the localisations.
I absolutely agree that more work on the user interface is welcome. It is
however not trivial because the differences between the many languages are
substantial. Given the ever increasing number of languages that we support
with a Wikipedia, it is realistic to expect languages that have requirements
that are typically not considered (a top down orientation for instance...)
MediaWiki is exceptional in that it already supports so many languages.
There are languages that cannot be handled correctly at this moment in time;
Neapolitan for instance includes '' in a sentence, something the parser
understands as a need for italic...
Thanks,
GerardM
On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 6:34 PM, Ravi shankar <ravidreams_03(a)yahoo.com>
wrote:
Leaving aside the wikiquette and formailities, the
mediawiki software
itself makes it tough for newcomers. Even one Post-Doc friend of mine could
not figure out the simplest wiki syntax! People are more comfortable with
WYSWYG editors. I had been watching wikipedia for last 3 years. MediaWiki
has hardly shown any improvement in usability and interface. It's time more
developers put in more effort in improving ease of using media wiki. Other
free software around the same time frame have improved dramatically.
Thanks
Ravi
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