On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 05:44, Peter Gervai grinapo@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 14:36, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
However, impenetrable wikitext is one of *the* greatest barriers to new users on Wikimedia projects. And this impenetrability is not, in any way whatsoever or by any twists of logic, a feature.
Adding a gui layer to wikitext is always okay, as long as it's possible to get rid of, since majority of edits not coming from "new users", and losing flexibility for power users to get more newbies doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
At least all of the GUIs I've seen were slow and hard to use, and resulted unwanted (side) effects if something even barely complex were entered. And this isn't the problem of Wikipedia: google docs, which is one of the most advanced web-based gui systems I guess have plenty of usability problems, which only can be fixed by messing with the Source. And many core people want to mess with the source.
So, adding a newbie layer is okay as long as you don't mess up the work of the non-newbies.
I totally agree with this analysis, and that's what brought us to write MeanEditor. Unfortunately I don't have much time to work on it right now (it was part of a much bigger wiki project which never came to light), so it's just a prototype.
It would be valuable if someone with a lot of wiki experience could write a list of what can be considered "basic" wikitext. That is, syntax that newbies can be reasonably expected to understand and manipulate through a (visual) editor. My list is at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor#Details.
I also want to share a funny fact with you: we have a sandbox on which anyone can test the editor. For some reason, a _lot_ of people expect to be able to write HTML code in wikitext (maybe they are implementing a CMS and are used to HTML coding?). Some even write stuff like "<h2>heading</h2>" and then complain that the editor lets them enter the text (of course, it's valid wikitext after all), but not edit it afterwards (HTML-style headings do not show up in the TOC, an odd wikitext feature which we surely don't want newbies to use). It might be useful to have a list of these "common mistakes" and show a warning ("Do you really want a non-TOC heading? Use == heading == otherwise.").
I'm not sure if the Usability team is working on this. They ran a visual editor survey some time ago, but right now they are probably working on more urgent matters. -- Jacopo