On Sun, Aug 13, 2006 at 05:08:56PM -0400, Edward Z. Yang wrote:
It's a hyperbole, I agree, however, the basic gist is there. People have their own idea of "What looks right", and then, if given the tools to do so, will reformat the text to their vision, not necessarily preserving structural meaning.
Thank You.
This point hasn't really been made yet, and it's probably critical.
Theoretically, as I understand things like Semantic Wikipedia, the goal is to precess specifically the Wikipedia databases roughly in that direction.
As Ed notes, leaning in the direction of WYSIWIKI tends to precess *away* from that, towards too much interest in how the wikitext's rendering *looks*.
A good example happened a while ago in a series of articles on a few bands. A few anonymous editors had been trying to spruce up the pages with lots of HTML, adding non-standard styling and the whole nine yards. Now, this was troublesome from a few editors who knew how to write HTML. Give that weapon to regular people.
Indeed.
The bottom-line is WYSIWYG is an even worse offender of causing people to base things around presentation rather than structure. Granted, wikitext can be abused, but when all that extra possible styling is stuffed away in esoteric <span>s and <div>s, it will prevent most Joe Averages from excessively formatting text.
One may argue that Wikitext doesn't really enforce structure. At least we don't have people typing [font size=5][b]Header[/b][/font] (bbcode, see it a lot in tutorials).
I, personally, think that wikitext inherently suggests structure.
Cheers, -- jra