[Wikipedia-l] Quality vs Quantity

[Ronald Chmara]

On Apr 29, 2007, at 6:10 AM, David Gerard wrote:
> On 29/04/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The problem with WYSIWYG is that it goes against the concept of
>> separating content and presentation.

Exactly. How does a person "see" what a blind wikipedian's text  
reader is going to say? :)

>> There are lots of different ways
>> of displaying the same wikitext (see all the different skins, but
>> that's only the beginning of what is theoretically possible), WYSIWYG
>> encourages people to write stuff that only looks right in the skin
>> that's used on the edit page. Writing in code encourages people to
>> just write the content and let the skin worry about the presentation,
>> which is generally preferable.
> That's a sweet thought, but in practice it puts people off writing  
> at all.
> By the way, is '' and ''' in the virtuous Wiki markup content or  
> presentation?

Content. A text synthesizer program may take those tags and use a  
higher pitched voice, louder volume, etc. A web page version of that  
same content could take that tags and use them to change text colors,  
fonts, convert to ALLCAPS, etc. Or, alternately, ignore them entirely.

I certainly will concur that not having WYSIWYG *does* turn off a  
certain segment of the population, a segment which is deeply  
ingrained with the idea that they can make a page look "just right",  
by manually playing with colors, fonts, line breaks, widows &  
orphans, kerning, ligatures, etc. (the list is quite long, I know  
this because I come from DTP, where designers obsess over such  
things), but I think working towards that goal might distract us from  
making an encyclopedia for everybody, not just "an encyclopedia that  
looks/sounds exactly the way Ronald Chmara wanted it to look/sound  
for the pages he has edited, on the output targets he tested".

My personal idea of how the web-page should look is certainly an  
opinion, but with all the content debates we already have, I'm not  
sure we should extend additional presentation debates onto all of our  
pages as well (beyond what we already have). As it already stands, I  
have been involved in discussions over template order and alignment,  
picture order and alignment, etc., usually with personalities who are  
using heavily hand-tweaked User: pages, which of course, are  
completely non-portable for the blind, hard to translate for RTL, etc.

I think it's good to have a certain amount of presentation-focused  
folks working on the project, but I think it would be bad to extend  
that level of presentation control into to a per-edit basis.

-Ronabop