[WikiEN-l] Jason Calancis on Wikipedia's technological obscurantism

[Oskar Sigvardsson]

On 10/13/07, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> http://www.calacanis.com/2007/02/20/technological-obscurification-three-ways-wikipedia-keeps-99-of/
>
> (no, he didn't know the word "obscurantism.")
>
> Discussion please.
>
>
> - d.

There are a couple of things that I'd like to bring up: First off all,
Calacanis seems to digress into his old "rant" about advertising,
which seems to me to be completely missing th point. MediaWiki has
wonderful developers who have worked really hard to create the best
wiki-software in the world, and most of them did it without pay.

Second, this seems to be one of those "Wikipedia could never work in
theory" kind of issues that frequently crop up. It is true that some
of our wikicode is fairly obtuse to the newcomer, but people seem to
figure out how it works pretty well. I mean, it's not like we have a
lack of users, including many who haven't seen a line of code in their
life.

Third, I don't think he understands how most people edits wikipedia. I
would bet good money that most people start to edit by pressing the
edit link at the top of a section (they see a typo and looks for the
nearest link, in other words). What will then show in 98% of cases is
not complicated at all, basically just the text of that section (no
infoboxes or scary templates, at most maybe an image tag). I think
wikipedia is easier to edit than he makes it out to be,

Fourth, many features of wikipedia relies on fairly advanced editing
techniques that couldn't easily be replicated with a wysiwyg-editor. I
think wikipedia would be a fair bit uglier if that tool was used. As
some-one said, pink Comic Sans everywhere!

It's one of those "I see what you're saying, but you're wrong"
kinda-situations. By the way, I just checked out the
LiquidThreads-thing on WikiEducator, and oh man, that looks fantastic!
This is something we should think about rolling out on wikipedia
proper.

--Oskar