On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Dmitriy Sintsov questpc@rambler.ru wrote:
The only really complex part of wikitext are the templates - nested, sometimes really weird subst and so on.
Templates and refs are by far the worst offenders, for sticking tons of content in the page that doesn't have any obvious relationship to the actual content. Getting rid of them would be a huge step forward. But stuff like '''bold''' and ==headings== are also a real problem. Everything unexpected like that is going to increase the risk that a new user will get worried he doesn't know what he's doing, and give up rather than risk breaking something or put effort into figuring out what to do. If you give *anyone*[1] a WYSIWYG interface, they'll know how it works, because they're used to it from Word and whatnot. That's just not true of wikitext, no matter how simple it is once you *already* understand it.
[1] Yes, yes, I mean anyone who uses computers much at all, not farmers in rural Africa or my maternal grandmother.