[Wikimedia-l] Apparently, Wikipedia is ugly

[David Gerard]

On 25 July 2012 20:48, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> wrote:

> So there were how many years of faffing about before they hired *one guy*
> for this project? This is an organisation with a $20m annual budget, now
> acquiring umpteen paid chapter officials.
> Wikipedia is about as user-friendly as Wordstar was in 1985.


Before you start in the usual fashion of "assume bad faith and
extrapolate from there", I suggest you do a bit of reading
(mediawiki.org, wikitech-l and *especially* wikitext-l) and find out
what the actual problem was and why this is actually a hard problem.
Here, I'll start you off:

1. No language definition.
2. Huge corpus of existing text in said undefined language that must
continue to work.

Now how about you stop ranting about how everyone must have just been
terrible and come back with a description in your own words of the
actual problem and what you expect would be a good plan of attack on
it. Who knows, you might come up with something new, good and useful.


- d.