On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Tisza Gergő gtisza@gmail.com wrote:
It is easy enough to edit for power users, who make the large majority of edits;
Retention of existing users is not a problem. We don't have to worry that a significant number of dedicated contributors will leave because of a switch to WYSIWYG. They are, by hypothesis, dedicated. On the other hand, new users being reluctant to contribute due to wikitext is a demonstrable and serious problem.
I also contest your implication that power users will uniformly or even mostly prefer wikitext to WYSIWYG. I'm a power user by any standard, but I use WYSIWYG wherever possible.
Last I heard, by the way, even now most actual *content* is added by occasional contributors. Power users may have more edits, but that doesn't mean they're the most important ones.
Of course, I should emphasize that ideally we should keep everyone happy. But making Wikipedia easier to edit for new users is *much* more important than making it easier for established editors. It will *always* be easier for established users to edit than new users, and established editors require a lot less coddling than new editors.
Wikis require a certain hacker mentality
- not in the technical sense, but a desire to understand things in depth.
No, they don't. One of the core principles of wikis is eliminating barriers to entry. Ten thousand people who each fix one typo a month are a tremendously valuable resource even if none of them ever contribute more. But many of them will -- *if* you can lure them into making those typo fixes to begin with. Which you can't, if they're scared off by the fixed-width text with random incomprehensible punctuation thrown in everywhere that has no obvious relationship to the article's actual content.
And then there is the ecosystem of bots, gadgets and other third-party tools which is based on wikitext, and not only would moving away from wikitext a huge maintenance burden, but again it would be replaced with something that is way less intuitive and actually harder to use (simple text operations are somewhat easier than fooling around with document trees).
Are you arguing here that it's easier for *bots* to edit wikitext than XML? Because that seems to be what you're saying, but I don't understand how that would make any sense. Wikitext is unparseable, bots have to resort to fragile regexes and hope they mostly work.
But replacing wikitext with some sort of internal representation that is unreadable for humans would be a huge mistake IMO.
It's not going to happen anytime soon in any case.