I'm taking liberty to summarize Trevor Parscal's
points (as issued on 02/06/2012 10:20 AM) as
follows:
Wikipedia is losing editors, and is looking less
competitive (?). The visual editor is supposed
to (help) remedy that.
If true, this is already diverting us completely
from the matters of *wikitext*.
To address the (sub)points themselves, the 3
points Trevor makes are irrefutable, -- however,
in a very abstract way. Yes, every visual tool
is, by definition, more enabling than its
lower-level counterpart.
But the further "perspective from "the visual
editor team" just begs for pointing out that the
lower entry threshold just can't be expected to
*produce* better participation levels, as the
perspective seems to suggest. It might be
expected just to *stimulate* those, indirectly.
All this, however, isn't addressing quite more
significant *people* problems that, as I
understand, have already cropped up in
Wikipedia. And I won't even start on
expertise-recognition and article-baby-sitting
issues.
The overall goal of the project might be
mentioned, too. Over the time, the wikipedians
*will* eventually run out of valid topics to
write about. For major subprojects this is
already in sight.
All said, what are we, in fact, discussing? I
get an impression everything, down to the
implementation, is already decided?
I wouldn't say no to some sort of visual editor,
which would work *only* with the document
structure, disregarding the presentation
completely, but is it even "on a table"?
Yury