[Wikipedia-l] Quality vs Quantity

[J.L.W.S. The Special One]

As a newbie, I had huge problems with markup, and even now, I find it
confusing. I agreee with Patrick.

We need to make markup easier for newcomers. This is one way of not biting them.

And as I previously mentioned, we need more dedicated article writers.
There's an increasing gulf between writers and Wikipedias who handle
meta tasks.

2007/4/28, Patrick Hall <pathall at gmail.com>:
> 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
>
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