On 02/12/2012 01:31 PM, Pavel Tkachenko wrote:
> Pavel, I asked Oliver Keyes, and he said that
>
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newbie_reverts_and_article_length
> may be of interest. He's not on this list, so if you have thoughts about
...
On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 07:12:54 +0100, Mike Dupont
<jamesmikedupont(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
I have stopped editing because of harassment and
wiki-stalking from WhiteWriter
and no one stops him from doing the same to many other people.
There are gangs of radicals that live on wikipedia and just make life
miserable for others, and no visual editor will stop that.
...which only seconds
Yuri's social factor thought.
Still, Yuri, how do you oppose the WMF studies Oliver has presented
earlier? About the factor of "any markup by default".
I do not oppose those studies at all, nor do I
deny their integrity.
Just that the research isn't accounting for much
of the important factors besides the plain
volume of text. What would be those, and how
those might be accounted for, I plainly don't know.
Just off the top of my head, no saying how it's
useful: attempts to edit what long pages were
more likely to be reverted? Were the long pages
the same over the years? Did the contested pages
actually grow? Who were the reverters?
Just like you say, one might form a distinct
impression that the participation numbers indeed
*are* falling. But will *enabling* the editing
with a (rushed?) visual job actually *help*?
I'm totally not blocking the mouths of visual
tool-hungry masses, but why must things be done
in such fashion? There were those leisurely "new
parser a year" years, and now, suddenly, there
is a rush? A complex tool like that, operating
on a content corpus which was created without
it, is just bound to break things. Are there a
projections for the breakage numbers and impact?
I wouldn't say Wikipedia is fit for the UNESCO
heritage (what about the conservation, eh?), but
it is good for some uses, after all.
Now, why not follow the MoinMoin example, and
construct an extension for loading the wiki-page
into OpenOffice, benefiting from the fact that
the return path is already well-covered? "Order
of magnitude" more simple.
Yury