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