2012/2/6 Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org:
I hope this effectively illustrates an alternative perspective on this subject. This is a very hard problem, and any course of action will involve some level of risk. We are trying our best to manage this risk, mostly by conducting a great deal of research and development.
This is understandable, the scale of problem is as such that it is inappropriate to take any action in one instant. I cannot say that your arguments have given me much to think about due to lack of specifics but I'm glad if they're more elaborated on the core level.
Still, I cannot see why it's impossible to first create a solid foundation without drastically changing everything and then build visual editor and other high-level structures on top of it. It's more than possible to have both plain text and visual editors in one place if it's proven that they suit different groups of users. Reworking present text editor and wiki syntax cannot be compared with writing rich editor with all MediaWiki features from scratch and it might even get some editors back. I have a hunch current WMF team can handle this in one month or less. IMO rethinking wiki syntax is still a must and if not done prior to high-level constructions it'll hit the devs (and users) hard in the end.
But I have already stated my arguments, no point in repeating them again.
Signed, P. Tkachenko