On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 05:44, Peter Gervai <grin...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 14:36, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> However, impenetrable wikitext is one of *the* greatest barriers to >> new users on Wikimedia projects. And this impenetrability is not, in >> any way whatsoever or by any twists of logic, a feature. > > Adding a gui layer to wikitext is always okay, as long as it's > possible to get rid of, since majority of edits not coming from "new > users", and losing flexibility for power users to get more newbies > doesn't sound like a good deal to me. > > At least all of the GUIs I've seen were slow and hard to use, and > resulted unwanted (side) effects if something even barely complex were > entered. And this isn't the problem of Wikipedia: google docs, which > is one of the most advanced web-based gui systems I guess have plenty > of usability problems, which only can be fixed by messing with the > Source. And many core people want to mess with the source. > > So, adding a newbie layer is okay as long as you don't mess up the > work of the non-newbies.
I totally agree with this analysis, and that's what brought us to write MeanEditor. Unfortunately I don't have much time to work on it right now (it was part of a much bigger wiki project which never came to light), so it's just a prototype. It would be valuable if someone with a lot of wiki experience could write a list of what can be considered "basic" wikitext. That is, syntax that newbies can be reasonably expected to understand and manipulate through a (visual) editor. My list is at <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor#Details>. I also want to share a funny fact with you: we have a sandbox on which anyone can test the editor. For some reason, a _lot_ of people expect to be able to write HTML code in wikitext (maybe they are implementing a CMS and are used to HTML coding?). Some even write stuff like "<h2>heading</h2>" and then complain that the editor lets them enter the text (of course, it's valid wikitext after all), but not edit it afterwards (HTML-style headings do not show up in the TOC, an odd wikitext feature which we surely don't want newbies to use). It might be useful to have a list of these "common mistakes" and show a warning ("Do you really want a non-TOC heading? Use == heading == otherwise."). I'm not sure if the Usability team is working on this. They ran a visual editor survey some time ago, but right now they are probably working on more urgent matters. -- Jacopo _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
