[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Tony Sidaway]

On 23 December 2010 10:55, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23 December 2010 10:43, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> To clarify my skepticism, the complexity of Wikipedia doesn't arise at
>> the user interface level at all but at the level of social
>> interaction. This is unavoidable because you're dealing with other
>> human beings, not a machine.  The complexity is necessary, even
>> desirable, for exactly the same reason.
>
>
> True. However, the markup is really an important way to put off the
> n00bs. People who are used to wikitext don't believe it, and say "but
> I'd think that XXX" - but here's the data point:
>

You've convinced me.  This in particular:

>
> "[CKEditor] very closely matches the experience non-technical people have gotten used to
> while using Word or WordPerfect. Leveraging skills people already have
> cuts down on training costs and allows them to be productive almost
> immediately."

For me WYSIWYG is synonymous with annoying stuff that gets in the way
of the code I want to write, and of course I take it as read that the
code stands for a procedural or functional abstraction of what the
computer is supposed to do. I don't find it difficult, but then I've
been doing it since I was in the lower sixth at school when I had to
type computer instructions on a teletype connected to a land line by
acoustic coupler.

Not everybody works that way. Most of us don't.  To those people the
buttons I find annoying may be the only thing they *do* understand,
they're the most accessible way of using a computer, and a user
interface lacking those buttons is alien and incomprehensible. With
the buttons, these people are intuitively able to produce a reasonable
minimal subset of tasks immediately as long as the result of their
work is displayed immediately (WYSIWYG).

It's still annoying, though.