[Wikipedia-l] Need of content (was: What a wiki table syntax...)

[Jeroen Heijmans]

"Hr. Daniel Mikkelsen" <daniel at copyleft.no> wrote:

 > I just can't see how you reach this conclusion. Nothing exudes 
knowledge like
 > pure content, without bells and whistles, color and flash.

 > Why not apply our own standards on style and layout as well? Because 
there is
 > simply no need for this! Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a 
Powerpoint slide!
 > And because once you open up colors and layout it _will_ be abused. 
People
 > _will_ use colors to encode content (see the periodic table), which 
means we
 > _will_ lose the ability to transfer cleanly to other media (such as 
voice or
 > print).

Though bells and whistles may be wrong, adding structure and colours may be
very useful, _especially_ for an encyclopedia. I use an encyclopedia to look
up information. Therefore, I don't (always) quickly want to read through an
enourmous amout of data. A table with the animal kingdom to which this 
species
belongs is a very quick way to find referenc information, and so is a 
coloured
elements table with specific groups easily identifiable. I wouldn't even 
consider
buying a plain text encyclopedia in my bookstore, would you?

As for the need to transfer to other formats: printed text can contain 
colour as
well (or gray-shades, for that matter) and one can talk rather 
colourfully ;-)
But seriously, if other formats were an issue at all, conversion should 
take care
of this.

 > In addition, as has been mentioned here again and again, layout and 
styling
 > will complicate markup, and this will scare away writers - and 
writers are more
 > important than readers.

Are they? Well, I certainly hope the article I write are read! 
Otherwise, I'll be
gone soon. Of course, we need writers, but I think we'll only scare away the
vandals, and not those really willing to contribute. There's a learning 
curve,
but new editors are coming in all the time, and most people understand 
that adding
in a complex structure takes some time to learn - and they do.

Adding one consistent style to a group of articles will in fact make it 
easier for
editors to work with them, since you can copy from other examples. The 
benefit for
the reader should be obvious, I think.

 > Another thing I already find quite upsetting is the tendency to use right
 > aligned "floating" tables. What is the use of this? It disociates the 
table
 > from the page, making it much more difficult for an alternate 
rendering agent
 > to determine where to put it (when to read it out aloud, for instance).

You will notice that many of these tables contain rather factual 
information that is
rather difficult to put in an article in a good running text (often the 
country
article, f.e. contained a group of sentences like: "The capital is X. 
The king is Y.
There are Z inhabitants." etc.). Nevertheless, these facts are sometimes 
the only
thing people are interested in.

The entire idea of such tables is not new; many encyclopedias in print 
also use
them.

 > But please, can't you all see that this is the road to disaster?

No, I can't.

Jeroen Heijmans