[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Stephanie Daugherty]

I would honestly say that the existing markup has long outlived its
usefulness. Editors should not only be free from dealing with
intricate markup, they should actually lack the tools and markup to do
such complex formatting because it is detremental to writing an
encyclopedia.

Instead of wysiwyg how aboud wysiwym (what you see is what you mean)
with clean symantic markup and all the issues of styling handled out
of site by the software through stylesheets. This would not only make
editing easier but also hold us to a high standard of consistancy
while enabling us to reach better quality standards and allowing us to
build better tools on top of that framework.

Of further concern to me is that we have far exceeded the limits of a
wiki as an effective collaboration platform. Collaboration at small
scale remains possible but talk pages dont scale well at all to tens
of thousands of users.

Further the software was never designed to be used in the way we use
it to implement process on wiki. Complex template based processes and
conversations based around heavy template usage are unnatural,
inefiicent, error prone, and have too steep a learning curve for
newcomers.

These issues are critical to fix if we are to scale but there is so
much inertia that i fear it would only be possible if changes were
forced. There are a lot of well established editors that actually
benefit from the status quo - the complexity and confusion inherent to
policy process and discussion tend to create a sort of inner circle of
editors that can effectively leverage the situation to their advantage
through the combination of knowledge and persistance.



On 12/22/10, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have to disagree strongly with the calls for WYSIWYG editing, not
> that it's likely to materialize anytime soon. Wikipedia needs to
> encourage people to concentrate on meaningful content, not dick around
> with cosmetic matters.
>
> Inline citations seriously hamper editing, however, and ways of
> keeping such clutter out of the edit box can and should be developed.
> Doing so would help editors to concentrate on content.
>
> I largely agree with most of Doc's other suggestions, and sadly agree
> that it's too late to roll back the jargon. The time to  curb that
> tendency was before the population explosion of 2005/2006.
>
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-- 
Faith is about what you really truly believe in, not about what you are
taught to believe.