[Wikipedia-l] GUI? WYSIWYG?

[Jan Hidders]

On Sun, Aug 11, 2002 at 07:32:45PM -0700, Michael R. Irwin wrote:
> 
> Sorry Jan, I did not mean to imply that graphics editing
> had not been considered.  I was attempting to weigh in 
> on the point that graphics is an important presention tool
> for our stated project goals.

No aplogies needed. I agreed that having editable graphics is important and
I just wanted to share that the technology is already there. In fact, it is
I who has to apologize to the developers because they had already considerd
it. They are are discussing it again at the moment.

> I agree we must press on with what we have but it makes
> me nervous to hear people claiming the text only wiki
> interface is an advantage that should be preserved.

It has to be preserved because we want Wikipedia to be as accessible as
possible and not just to people with WebDAV-enabled browsers or something.
It's quite possible to provide an extra WebDAV interface, but what problem
would that solve? That doesn't mean we cannot also have next to the
text-only interface more user-friendly (more graphical, more WYSIWYG,
whatever) interfaces. In fact, that will probably happen anyway because
there are developers who think it is worth their time. But Wikipedia will
always have to stay simple enough to be usable with a text-only interface.

-- Jan Hiders