David Gerard writes; > Our current markup is one of our biggest barriers to participation.
Yes. > * Starting from a clear field makes it ridiculously easy. We could start with solutions for first-time posters, new articles, and new talk-page comments -- any comprehensive solution should be compatible with short-term solutions that solve this 'ridiculously easy' part -- which happens to address what many first-time editors need. Stephanie Daugherty writes: > Not only is the current markup a barrier to participation, it's a barrier to > development. As I argued on Wikien-l, starting over with a markup that can < be syntacticly validated... would reap huge rewards in the safety and effectiveness > of automated tools. A lack of WYSIWY* is often a barrier to adoption of MediaWiki as opposed to other wiki platforms, independent of whether or not potential editors who visit a MW site feel comfortale editing it. I recall that P2PU for instance wanted to run MW but used pbwiki instead because of its WYSIWYG editor. > By aiming for WYSIWYM, some things would render in the editor in a > way that makes them easier to understand and edit. For example, templates > could render in the editor as tables or as a block that loads the template < parameters into a sidebar when clicked... WYSIWYM editors can be friendly > to both experienced and new users alike - take LyX as a good example Victor writes; > I always viewed wikitext vs. WYSIWYG dilemma as similar to LaTeX vs. > Microsoft Word one. In this context, LyX is a good example; it sees its WYSIWYM implementation as halfway between the two. Stephanie writes: > Layouts would be a new form of template, designed to apply as a > block-level outline to an article, providing both a framework to build a > particular type of article, and defining the formatting for that article in > a manner that templates and article markup would no longer be permitted to > do. It's likely that layouts would be treated like highly used templates and < the interface itself... one to an article, so the interface to select one would > probably be just selecting it from a dropdown or typing it's name. I really like the idea of separating article text, local templates, and page-wide layout. I don't know if 'three different paresers' are needed, but just being able to define a stylesheet for a named layout would save time and frustration. Brion writes: > Getting anything done that would work on the huge, well-developed, > wildly-popular Wikipedia has always been a non-starter because it has to > deal with 10 years of backwards-compatibility from the get-go. I think it's > going to be a *lot* easier to get things going on those smaller projects > which are now so poorly served How do we make it easier to implement new things for individual smaller projects? > For the Wikipedia case, we need to incubate the next generation of templating Is this a problem space we could tackle in tandem with MindTouch and others who care about simple interfaces to edit and view complex information? Sam. -- Samuel Klein identi.ca:sj w:user:sj +1 617 529 4266 _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
