"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" daniel@copyleft.no wrote:

I just can't see how you reach this conclusion. Nothing exudes

knowledge like

pure content, without bells and whistles, color and flash.

Why not apply our own standards on style and layout as well? Because

there is

simply no need for this! Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a

Powerpoint slide!

And because once you open up colors and layout it _will_ be abused.

People

_will_ use colors to encode content (see the periodic table), which

means we

_will_ lose the ability to transfer cleanly to other media (such as

voice or

print).

Though bells and whistles may be wrong, adding structure and colours may be very useful, _especially_ for an encyclopedia. I use an encyclopedia to look up information. Therefore, I don't (always) quickly want to read through an enourmous amout of data. A table with the animal kingdom to which this species belongs is a very quick way to find referenc information, and so is a coloured elements table with specific groups easily identifiable. I wouldn't even consider buying a plain text encyclopedia in my bookstore, would you?

As for the need to transfer to other formats: printed text can contain colour as well (or gray-shades, for that matter) and one can talk rather colourfully ;-) But seriously, if other formats were an issue at all, conversion should take care of this.

In addition, as has been mentioned here again and again, layout and

styling

will complicate markup, and this will scare away writers - and

writers are more

important than readers.

Are they? Well, I certainly hope the article I write are read! Otherwise, I'll be gone soon. Of course, we need writers, but I think we'll only scare away the vandals, and not those really willing to contribute. There's a learning curve, but new editors are coming in all the time, and most people understand that adding in a complex structure takes some time to learn - and they do.

Adding one consistent style to a group of articles will in fact make it easier for editors to work with them, since you can copy from other examples. The benefit for the reader should be obvious, I think.

Another thing I already find quite upsetting is the tendency to use right aligned "floating" tables. What is the use of this? It disociates the

table

from the page, making it much more difficult for an alternate

rendering agent

to determine where to put it (when to read it out aloud, for instance).

You will notice that many of these tables contain rather factual information that is rather difficult to put in an article in a good running text (often the country article, f.e. contained a group of sentences like: "The capital is X. The king is Y. There are Z inhabitants." etc.). Nevertheless, these facts are sometimes the only thing people are interested in.

The entire idea of such tables is not new; many encyclopedias in print also use them.

But please, can't you all see that this is the road to disaster?

No, I can't.

Jeroen Heijmans