[Wikipedia-l] Quality vs Quantity

[Mark Clements]

"Ronald Chmara" <ron at Opus1.COM> wrote in
message news:B203BF24-4A66-48BA-8ADE-3D94AB249B5E at opus1.com...
> 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.
[SNIP]
>
> 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".

That is not really an argument against WYSIWYG.  You are arguing about what
features should be included in a WISIWYG editor, not whether we should have
such an editor.

I think that everyone on this list would agree that any such editor for
Wikipedia would NOT include options for changing font/text color/text-size,
etc.  They would also probably agree that having a button which pops up a
friendly 'insert link' dialog box, or the ability to edit lists with an
indent/outdent button (just two examples) would make editing for the
uninitiated a whole load easier without crossing the content/presentation
boundary.

There will be some arguments in the middle ground, but to be honest I don't
think there will be many.  Anything that can already easily be done in pure
wiki markup will probably be included, anything else probably won't and
that's probably where most of the arguments will begin and end.

I also suspect that if someone has the perseverence and dedication to
actually implement this out of our current wacky parser, then the feature
list will be whatever they happen to choose, and so the bike shed will
already be painted before any discussion starts...

- Mark Clements (HappyDog)