[Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

[mikelifeguard at fastmail.fm]

That makes perfect sense, and that is exactly the rationale behind LaTeX
(and other such typesetting software). Good documents have good structure;
WYSIWYG is not intended to foster good structure, it's designed to foster
looking pretty. While looking pretty is nice, it should never come at the
expense of form. If you have good structure the rest can come along behind.

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: Delphine Ménard [mailto:notafishz at gmail.com] 
Sent: September 25, 2008 1:55 PM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Can anyone really edit Wikipedia?

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 17:48, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/9/25 Delphine Ménard <notafishz at gmail.com>:
>
>> For what it's worth, I think WYSIWYG is evil. But there is probably a
>> middle path between cluttered text and Word-like unstructuration.
>
>
> It shouldn't be worse than wikitext - wikitext isn't any more
> structured than Word. It's a display markup code that translates into
> HTML, not  a document structure code.

Maybe not, but it mostly forces some kind of structure if you want it
to look "pretty". Which WYSIWYG doesn't. You can just bold up stuff
and make it size 40 and it looks like a header, but isn't one. That's
what I mean with "structure", if that make sense.

Delphine

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