On 8/10/06, Christiaan Briggs christiaan@yurkycross.co.uk wrote:
However, I think I have enough experience trying to get people to participate on Wikipedia and on our local intranet (which uses MediaWiki) to be worthy of reporting. I also have my own personal experience, which is that I don't like using wiki markup, I don't like relearning it each time I use it, and I don't like seeing a sea of monospaced text every time I use it. So I understand their point of view.
I quite agree. Where I work uses a mediawiki. The software developers have no problem with it (although I had to explain a few concepts to them that they hadn't come across by themselves), but the sales, marketing and support people are much less comfortable with it, and make much fewer strides beyond "put this text where someone told me to put it".
MediaWiki does *not* have a great user interface. It's ok, and it's a hell of a lot better than the shots I've seen of the original Wikipedia. But it could be a lot better. I don't have many constructive suggestions to make for the moment, but I could start by suggesting that getting metadata about pages out of the page text itself (categories, interwikis and redirects come to mind), would be an improvement.
But until I'm in a position to really help, I'll try and keep a lid on it :)
In any case my point has already been answered. There are already moves afoot to prioritise and bring some sort of WYSIWYG to MediaWiki from what some people have said.
It's going fairly slowly.
Steve