On Thu, 09 Feb 2012 09:32:43 -0500, Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 08.02.2012 2:52, Platonides wrote:
At the beginning, the interesection was huge even if ability to edit was low, just because there was a lot of knowledge missing. So as the knowledge increases (eg. linearly) "people" appear to be more and more stupid for editing.
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 that, please cc him.
Thanks, Sumana and Oliver. This research seems relevant but its result doesn't seem to support or refute the abovementioned statement.
On Fri, 10 Feb 2012 13:26:31 +0200, Yury Tarasievich yury.tarasievich@gmail.com wrote:
So, you are going to "break things" for the distant and rather doubtful gain.
I'm getting a hunch WMF guys are just desperate to do anything about the falling statistics and since they can't think of means to change the social factor they chose the visual editor approach.
On Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:20:51 +0100, Platonides platonides@gmail.com
The Visual Editor is the candy with which you try to engage them.
Editors should hardly be motivated to edit by the convenient editor alone. If it's so eveybody will add an extra comma or colon just to bite this "candy".
On Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:38:23 -0500 (EST), Jay Ashworth jra@baylink.com
But after all the time the web design community has spent trying to get us to deal in semantics, rather than presentation, it seems pretty ironic to me that we see such a pressure to do precisely the opposite...
Are you talking about the markup or visual editor? It it's the latter I would agree but if it's the former then I'd say it's just the trouble of (most) existing text markups that they don't follow HTML4+ steps and continue connecting tokens with presentation instead of semantics.
On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 01:08:03 +0400, vitalif@yourcmc.ru wrote:
At long last, most of the internet users successfully use BBCode on the forums - why they can't use wikitext?..
I agree with vitalif (I believe I have mentioned this earlier) - I have even seen housewives using BB-codes when they really need to (in those flashy pinky thread headposts).
On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 01:16:51 +0400, vitalif@yourcmc.ru wrote:
I don't even remember if I have read a manual for any of my cellphones.
I'm sure not just because you ignore the rules, but because all modern cellphones have intuitive interface. Many users read manuals for their FIRST cellphone.
Right, visual editor must be a cellphone that requires no manual while ideal markup must requiring getting familiar with any kind of text markup - any most literate people already do because we all write ordered lists in similar way and emphasize our words by underlining them. Something like that.
On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 07:12:54 +0100, Mike Dupont jamesmikedupont@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".
Signed, P. Tkachenko