On 02/10/2012 02:24 AM, George Herbert wrote:
On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 3:47 PM,vitalif@yourcmc.ru wrote:
Improving usability is good, but targetting at people who don't want to be "technically proficient" (emphasis: DON'T WANT TO BE, not just "ARE NOT") and just want to press a magic button and "that's all" is not good.
I strongly disagree, as does community consensus on this point.
There are barriers we need to have between would-be editors and the content - such as basic competence in the language, lack of conflict of interest, willingness to be a participant in shared editing processes. Technically, the presence of a web browser is a legitimate barrier, but the "learn wikitext or else" one is bogus.
I mostly stayed away from the discussion here, but I feel I have to say (again) that:
I believe that the "wikitext obscuration" will just break things, not helping the participation figures as expected. It might be fun to produce a visual editor etc., but this is solving just a completely different problem from "lowering the barriers" stated here many times.
The Wikipedia participation problem, especially at this stage of the project's lifecycle, is a social problem, not technical. Putting on a new frontend to the "old" wiki-engine will address that how? Let's imagine one day of wikipedia's life with visual editor magically added. What would change?
The main problem is wikipedia model of encyclopedical content creation itself has an inherent, irremovable flaws, if regarded from the point of view of expertise representation. All right, /it turns/, the wikipedia is there (and has some credibility problems, and some expertise problems), but the main expenditures in its creation were not on wikitext learning and using. The essential motivating trick/move was already there (...*anybody* can edit...), and it is exactly that trick/move which creates the meanest problems now, the problems which you guys try to remedy with business-style projects like "usability-friendly visual editing of wikitext".
Sorry if I didn't make myself clear.
Yury