[Wikipedia-l] Quality vs Quantity

[Patrick Hall]

Hi,

One observation that may be related to the rate of creation of new
articles: the markup is becoming positively bewildering.

In some ways it's harder than HTML -- just figuring out where the
first paragraph is in the markup can be non-trivial. I've had the
experience of contributing something, clicking preview, and seeing
that I've borked someone's infobox or table or thicket of <ref>s or
whatever. To be honest I often will just not submit my contribution,
rather than sort out what's going on in the markup. And I'm not a new
user; I've been making small contributions on and off for several
years.

I can't imagine what a brand new user's first impression is when they
click "edit" for the first time... I suspect it's often something
along the lines of "eek, I don't want to break this."

I'm certainly not trying to disparage the fine work that's been done
to create the Mediawiki software, I'm just trying to simulate the POV
of a newbie here (I imagine there aren't many on this list).

- Pat