[Wikipedia-l] What a wiki table syntax needs to do to work withcurrent table layouts

[Kurt Jansson]

I just wanted to say, that I'm all on the side of the "keep it simple"
fraction. Someone (Hawking?) said, that with every math formula in a
book you loose half of your readers, or something like that. I think
with every new wiki tag we will loose a big amount of new editors (not
readers)!

The fraction of people coming to Wikipedia and not knowing (and not
wanting to know) the concept of a markup language is growing every day.
Especially older people are frightened to damage something on our site.
And the more the text they see in the article differs from the one in
the EditBox, the likelier it gets that they just hit the "back" button.
That's at least my experience in convincing people to take part in our
project.


> But won't a colorless place look boring? Deal with it! Wikipedia
already looks
> boring! Let someone make a flash front end one day, instead.

All those CSS ideas are interesting and attractive, but wouldn't it be
better to keep these things for the staff which creates the stable,
"just for readers" set of articles in one or two years?

I say, better loose some readers then loose some editors. And I think
this is even more true for the international Wikipedias.


Kurt