I don't actually have an opinion on David's proposal yet.
I am however under the impression that it probably has gotten confused with earlier proposals by some of us and that it hasn't really been looked at by most of us. Without having made up my mind, I think it does indeed deserve another look:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2004-October/ 035317.html
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
On 6 Oct 2004, at 11:06, David Friedland wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
You underestimate the problems with readability you get when your proposal is set into motion. I do not think I will bother with editing en:texts when I cannot easily read what it says. When people are edititing a text, they have to read what it says. All this extra balast will make it hard just to READ the article let alone edit it. So maybe there are "plenty" people who get bothered when they read something they are not familiar with but making it extra hard to editors will also make for "plenty" people who resent this unreadable garble.
How exactly does putting curly brackets around a word make it any less readable than square brackets as for links, or quote marks as for bold and italic?
I'm sorry, but calling
The primary {{colors}}, according to ''The Big Book of Color'', are [[red]], [[yellow]], and [[blue]].
"unreadable garble", but saying
The primary colors, according to ''The Big Book of Color'', are [[red]], [[yellow]], and [[blue]].
is not "unreadable garble" is disingenuous.
An other thing you miss is that with other ways of writing you get slightly
different
meanings and your system CANNOT cater for that.
Neither does your system, which I presume is doing nothing. I'm not claiming my proposal is a cure-all for problems regarding understandability. It is, however, a way to increase understandability and also increase consistency. Doing nothing, of course, does nothing to increase understandability or consistency.
- David
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l