Rob Church wrote:
On 14/08/06, GerardM gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, If these other users like you do not have a chance to edit anyway.. what is your point ? And how many insist on their use of "power" by effectively threatening stagnation because of the unwillingness to move forward ? Should we not consider the gains made by providing a better environment and the potential influx of new capable people against the potential of "power" users that may or may not abandon editing MediaWiki ?
My point is that if you start losing users, you're in trouble. No-one's threatening stagnation, we're simply trying to argue that restricting editing to a fancy interface is a bad idea...locking people out of the underlying markup layer is a bad idea...there is no unwillingness to move forward. I haven't said "this is a shit idea and Jimbo is a moron", have I?
It's quite possible for us to provide a nice little WYSIWYG interface to start with, degrading gracefully to editing the markup for advanced users who specify thus in their user preferences, or whose browsers/environment don't support it. Doing anything other than that breaks Wikimedia's lovey-dovey pact of accessibility, and I'm sure we don't want to do *that*, now, do we?
Rob Church
Hoi, As I explained before, the current wikisyntax is broken. It discriminates against those users who have keyboards where the keys, "we" who use a "US-keyboard" take for granted, are missing. There is no strategy and we are unwilling to consider how to remove the use of the codes to indicate italic script. The double quote is used in the Neapolitan language. Suggesting that our current functionality is great is demonstratively wrong. Your suggestion does not allow these things to be fixed because people will be up in arms when we suggest that these things need fixing. Like you many will suggest that they will vote with their feet.
In many ways, this argument is like the one at the start of the previous century that someone has to walk with a flag in front of an automobile. We all know this did not last and we also know that the car is now one of the biggest killers of our society. However, nobody can seriously suggest that something can be done about it because it would diminish "freedom", when they do they are largely ignored.
Thanks, GerardM