[Wikipedia-l] Re: Parsing
lcrocker at nupedia.com
lcrocker at nupedia.com
Tue Jul 30 22:06:49 UTC 2002
> We can do psychological testing to determine when simplicity
> switches, but other people will switch it at slightly different
> times. Best all around to allow both methods.
This I have to disagree with totally. Leaving in a mix of both is
horrible. Our markup here serves a different purpose than other
markup languages. It /must/ be editable by novices. Wikitext that
produces a nice page, but can't be edited, is bad wikitext. For an
extreme example, see the article "Duesseldorf"--this is precisely the
kind of abomination that allowing too much HTML produces. It might
be a fine article, but it will never be improved because it's
impossible to edit. That's fine for web page, but not for a wiki.
As comfortable as all of us are with HTML, /we/ aren't the kind of
people we want editing articles (except maybe those on computer
subjects). We want Bridge players writing about Bridge, and cat
breeders writing about cats, and campers writing about camping--the
kind of people who have never even heard of HTML are the kind of
people we want most to attract and make use of. We computer nerds
are used to dealing with special syntaxes; it is we who should adapt
to them, not the other way around.
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