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

[David Gerard]

On 13/10/2007, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> 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/

> His name is Calacanis,


And it's right there  in the URL. I suppose this is what I get for
including a vocabulary flame.


> and it's an old thread - but IMHO quite
> relevant to the discussion about slowing growth.


Yes, which is why I forwarded it.


> Good WYSIWYG in a wiki is hard; even Wikia hasn't solved that
> particular problem yet. Hopefully we'll make serious progress on it
> next year.
> The LiquidThreads discussion extension which could replace talk pages
> is now in production use e.g. on WikiEducator.org ; all it needs is a
> champion within the Wikimedia community.


Really? That's excellent :-)

The comment I added  to the discussion was:

===
1. The main problem is that MediaWiki wikitext does not have a defined
syntax - the definition is quite literally the PHP code - and is
mathematically impossible to put into EBNF. (Many have tried, got to
95% and realised it wasn't actually possible.) So there are no
alternate parsers, and no WYSIWYG can cover the lot. But 95% coverage
in a WYSIWYG editor should get most of the useful bits.

FCKeditor looks like the best prospect for a WYSIWYG MediaWiki editor
at present. It's not there yet, but I hold out hope for the near to
medium future.

2. Talk pages are indeed a crappy forum format. There are various
extensions to help improve this - Uncyclopedia uses the forum
extension to good effect (wikitext pages but with a forumlike main
page) and the LiquidThreads extension is undergoing serious work.

3. On this one, I think you're plain wrong. (a) IRC is damn useful,
but you do not in any way have to be on IRC to be a productive
Wikipedia editor, admin or even arbitrator. And many aren't and won't
be. (b) I find it hard to conceive how any Internet idiot can lower
the world's collective IQ with instant messaging, but thinking people
who would want to contribute to an encyclopedia can't. And IRC is IM
based around chatrooms instead of one-to-one. If you can use Trillian
or GAIM/Pidgin, you can use IRC.
===


- d.