[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[George Herbert]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 3:51 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 23 December 2010 11:48, Tony Sidaway <tonysidaway at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>
> Yeah. It won't be a happener on WMF sites, I think, until WMF has
> money to throw at developers to develop something that actually works
> and has fidelity with wikitext as it's used. This is a *big and hairy*
> problem that interested parties have been dashing their foreheads
> against for *years*.


Right.

The social stuff which is complex is something which is a barrier, but
one that all western society members who are modern communications
literate are fundamentally equipped to handle.  Some will fail at it
but you really just need to be good at electronic communications,
functionally literate, and social enough to handle basic give and take
discussions.

Very few people master the markup; very many fewer than that can hack
or understand the underlying code.  I'm a coder; I've dived into the
MW parser on and off, and other parts of it, to understand functional
behaviors better.  But I also do outreach and computer training at
times, and most normal people could never approach that level, and
find wiki markup onerous when I ask them about it...


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com