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

[Phil Sandifer]

On Oct 13, 2007, at 5:43 PM, geni wrote:

> Would make a complete mess of fromowner and significantly slow down
> editing stuff in templates I'm also not total sure how the ref tags
> would react.
>

I'm not sure I understand the problem with fromowner - nor would I  
think we'd touch the image pages, which are completely non-human  
readable anyway, more or less by design.

Certain maintenance tags seem to me like they should be excluded -  
unreferenced, npov, accuracy dispute, and cleanup are obvious ones,  
to me - these are things that people should probably be able to see.

The slowdown is no doubt genuine, but I'm not sure the slowdown is  
significant unless you're doing a huge amount of batch template  
editing, in which case you're probably automating anyway. And if the  
templates are always in a consistent location, it shouldn't be a huge  
problem. The biggest problem I see is the lag in people adding the  
new header pages to their watchlists.

> Generally if someone hits the edit button they should be able to edit
> the info on that page.

Sure - but if we're creating huge HCI problems with our templates,  
which I'm inclined to agree we are, we're already creating difficulty  
in editing the info on a given page. I think this is a trade-off -  
certain things about a page become harder to edit, but the overall  
page's editability increases.

-Phil