* Aryeh Gregor Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.com [Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:57:27 -0400]:
Programmers rank far, far below normal people when it comes to usability prioritization. Programmers can use WYSIWYG just as well as anyone else, even if it's not as powerful as they'd like. FWIW, on forums I go to where I can use either BB code or WYSIWYG, I use WYSIWYG most of the time -- it's just more convenient. I only resort to BB code to work around deficiencies in the WYSIWYG editor.
I prefer to use BB code and rarely use forum icons. That's a matter of personal choice.
Even for programmers, learning a new syntax is a significant issue. A few months ago I spoke to a programmer I know who tried editing Wikipedia a few times. He got lost in the wikitext.
The only really complex part of wikitext are the templates - nested, sometimes really weird subst and so on. I remember reading "Advanced Templates" at meta and have the feeling I am reading something really cryptic - I am still not good at making complex templates. Tables, links, text formatting, images are easy to me (there were great guides like "Advanced tables" at meta back in v1.9.3..v1.10 when I've started to use MediaWiki). Of course it doesn't matter, because I am hardly a representative.
He knew he could figure out how to make the correction he wanted if he had to, but in practice, he just gave up without putting in the effort. It was too much of a barrier to entry to overcome his weak interest in fixing the error he saw.
Only the complex template I can think of reason.
As far as I'm concerned, a situation in which WYSIWYG is the only supported editing method would be far superior to the current situation. If we could allow power users to edit manually, that would be a nice bonus. Note that even if we use a format like XML that's a pain to manually edit, programmers can write up their own front-ends if they like -- they're programmers, after all! And also note that as with most WYSIWYG editors, there would presumably be a slew of keyboard shortcuts for power users to memorize if they didn't want to use the mouse.
Maybe it should be possible to store everything in XML and "map" XML to wikitext on the fly for these who like wikitext, and also to make future core compatible with old bots. Eg. {| will be stored internally as wmf:table. Dmitriy