[Wikipedia-l] Quality vs Quantity

[Andre Engels]

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

> 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).

An idea to improve this: How about the following - it requires an
extra piece of markup, but it would still I think simplify matters for
newbies:

Create an extra piece of markup, or maybe a template, with the
following effect (I will choose ((..)) as my markup, probably not
ideal, but if there is interest in it, we can think of something
better):

Starting from a page:

blablabla {{some ingenious but complicated template}} blablabla

we change to:

blablabla ((template|{{some ingenious but complicated template}})) blablabla

This has no effect on the page as it is shown normally, but when one
checks the edit page, one sees:

blablabla ((template)) blablabla

and below the edit field there is a second edit field, with a header
'template:' and content

{{some ingenious but complicated template}}

That way, the starting user, when editing the page does not need to
bother with complicated or boring stuff like tables, templates and
interwikis, but can just work in the top  screen, where there is much
more content and simple makeup, and much less complicated makeup to
worry about screwing up.

For experienced editors and especially for bots it would be useful to
have an alternative 'raw' input screen, where the normal edit text can
be found.

Advantages:
* easier editing by newbies
* less searching for the correct place to edit

Disadvantages:
* creating an edit page will require a (small) amount of parsing
* if one goes wrong, the results will probably be larger (removing the
complicated markup rather than just making a mess of it)
* yet another addition to MediaWiki markup

-- 
Andre Engels, andreengels at gmail.com
ICQ: 6260644  --  Skype: a_engels