On 05/29/2014 08:57 PM, James Salsman wrote:
but it was misplaced because being able to figure out wikitext is an excellent attribute in new editors
I think that statement fails on two aspects: for one, saying that the enthusiasm 'was misplaced' is rather premature as VE itself is rather incomplete - we do not yet know its potential.
Secondly, and more importantly in my mind, "being able to figure out wikitext" might be a good attribute, but making it a requirement pretty much sacrifices any hope we have of getting rid of our systemic bias. The vast majority of the planet cannot - or will not - have the time and resources to learn an arcane and overcomplicated mishmash of markup languages; yet many of those have knowledge and skill to share.
In 2004, when articles were mostly unformatted, that argument made sense. Most anyone with minimal computer skills (and that's already a very restricted slice of the population) could edit a page to fix a typo or add a statement or two without much difficulty.
Nowadays? Not so much. For the untrained eye, even finding the glaring typo you saw in a reference is nearly impossible after you hit the edit button.
-- Marc