[WikiEN-l] Re: simplicity of markup and presentation

[Björn Lindqvist]

I agree that unnecessary markup is... unnecessary. But there are two 
sides of the coin, on one hand we don't want people to have to install 
MS Frontpage (or whatever it is called) and have three years web design 
experience. But on the other hand, most Wikipedia pages are rather ugly 
and boring. They are like just text! I mean who wants to read four pages 
of NPOV encyclopedic text where the most interesting things are the 
paragraph breaks? :-) We're modern people with attention spans measured 
in seconds.

For example, take the Rambot* city pages, how much better wouldn't those 
pages be if their information was presented in a more attractive way? I 
have already complained about the lack of pictures, but as that problem 
seems to be unsolvable unless someone spends a million dollars on 
lawyers researching copyright laws, we have to find other ways to make 
the information pretty.

Currently the easiest and only way to make pretty articles is to use 
html. It has the disadvantages that it makes it harder for most editors 
to edit articles and someday it might cause severe browser 
incompatibilities and problems for disabled users. But isn't that a 
problem with all new features? I'll bet someone already has asked 
themselve how to edit the table of contents...

So instead of letting the not so smart people be a hinderance for the 
way of the future lets make them smarter by providing good documentation 
and make everything as easy as possible so that everyone can be happy.

BL

* - Everyone seems to complain about Rambot so I figured it would be 
safe for me to take a potshot too, but it was just an example many other 
articles suffer from the same problem.