[Wikimedia-l] Apparently, Wikipedia is ugly

[geni]

On 17 July 2012 00:46, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sounds great. And as we discussed, the Commons front end could really do
> with work too.

Not much point until the backend is sorted out. Basically you need to
turn mediawiki into a true content management system rather than a
wiki moving in the direction of being a CMS.


> I honestly don't understand why it is taking so many years to develop a
> WYSIWYG editor, for example,

Because given current mediawiki markup it probably isn't possible even
in theory. Mediawiki markup with ParserFunctions installed is probably
Turing complete and wikipedians have taken advantage of is. As a
result trying to create an WYSIWYG editor that will interact with the
current article set is probably impossible. WYSIWYM may be a better
approach.


> or a new Commons search function.

That largely goes back to mediawiki not really being designed for image hosting.

However even if it wants image searching is a hard problem. Stock
photo agencies do better than most but thats because their
photographers have a direct financial incentive to make their pictures
findable. For any other images archive expect to do a lot of digging.
Of course for most people simply typing what you want pics of into
wikipedia is the best approach. For example typing "Sutton Hoo" into
wikipedia produces a pretty good set of images.

>Honestly,
> people, if you want to create paid jobs, don't inflate the chapter
> structure, but employ and pay a few programmers and designers.

Its more than a few I'm afraid . And in any case you've got the
problem that there isn't much of a pool of people who really know
their way around the mediawiki codebase.

-- 
geni