On Sat, Aug 03, 2002 at 03:39:01PM +0200, Kurt Jansson wrote:
I just wanted to say, that I'm all on the side of the "keep it simple" fraction. Someone (Hawking?) said, that with every math formula in a book you loose half of your readers, or something like that. I think with every new wiki tag we will loose a big amount of new editors (not readers)!
The fraction of people coming to Wikipedia and not knowing (and not wanting to know) the concept of a markup language is growing every day. Especially older people are frightened to damage something on our site. And the more the text they see in the article differs from the one in the EditBox, the likelier it gets that they just hit the "back" button. That's at least my experience in convincing people to take part in our project.
Hi Kurt,
I totally aggree, it should stay simple to contribute. But at the moment wikipedia develops in a bad direction. Take a look at
http://www.wikipedia.com/w/wiki.phtml?title=Duesseldorf&action=edit
for an example of markup that even scares me (and I'm HTML-literate for nearly 9 years).
This is the markup to be stopped.
Regards,
JeLuF