2012/2/6 Trevor Parscal <tparscal(a)wikimedia.org>rg>:
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