--- Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Stephen Gilbert wrote:
Ward Cunningham, the founder of Wiki, says on WhyWikiWorks (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WhyWikiWorks) "Wiki is not WYSIWYG (WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet).
It's an
intelligence test of sorts to be able to edit a
wiki
[...] I think he's probably right. We should remember
that
I think the Portland Pattern Repository (on the topic of object-oriented programming) and Wikipedia (a general purpose encyclopeida) are enough different in scope and target audience to have different rules.
I'm not suggesting a rule, but simply making an observation. I'm also not against GUIs and multimedia, as long as we don't lose focus, trying to make everything flashy and clickable. If someone wants to make a GUI client for Wikipedia, great. Let's just not make it mandatory for contributing.
I also think a GUI is unwiki only as much as it is unhuman for man to go to the moon. Nobody had done it before 1969. Some thought it was impossible. It might not be really useful, but there could be value in proving that it is possible and learning from the experience.
Sure, as long as it doesn't get in the way of creating a truly useful, copylefted encyclopedia. I don't think there's some doctrinal WikiWay that cannot be bent or reshaped. The very nature of Wikipedia itself is quite different from any other wiki.
Stephen G.
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