It seems to me that early on the development curve of wiki software made a choice (a bad one, in my opinion) to go the code direction rather than the WYSIWYG direction. The longer they linger in code, the harder it will be to do a course correction to a WYSIWYG interface, which is really where this needs to be to draw from the widest pool of contributors around the planet and see the wiki achieve its full potential. The chasm presently is so great that the typical developer is probably going to be scared off by the daunting task. Overwhelming.
Perhaps PESWiki can provide some leadership by combining these two and showing how well it works to do so.
Sterling Allan http://peswiki.com
----- Original Message ----- From: "Sj" 2.718281828@gmail.com To: "MediaWiki announcements" mediawiki-l@wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 12:41 PM Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-l] what-you-see-is-what-you-get edit program?
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When I ask regular readers why they don't contribute, the most common response is they're not experts in anything, they don't feel they have anything to add. A close runner-up is that they tried once but got frustrated; they're not sure where to add an idea, or how the syntax works; or they don't have time. The clearer and more intuitive the editing interface, the faster the learning curve, and the fewer people who will think they don't have time to figure it out.