Hoi,<br>Given the limited group of people working on the development of mediawiki, the biggest effort has so far been in maintaining the quality and the scalability of the software. As the funding has been really limited, you will find that much of the work on usability has been in the functionality of the templates, the way files like soundfiles and movies are supported and also in the way languages are supported in the localisations. <br>
<br>I absolutely agree that more work on the user interface is welcome. It is however not trivial because the differences between the many languages are substantial. Given the ever increasing number of languages that we support with a Wikipedia, it is realistic to expect languages that have requirements that are typically not considered (a top down orientation for instance...)<br>
<br>MediaWiki is exceptional in that it already supports so many languages. There are languages that cannot be handled correctly at this moment in time; Neapolitan for instance includes &#39;&#39; in a sentence, something the parser understands as a need for italic...<br>
<br>Thanks,<br>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; GerardM<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 6:34 PM, Ravi shankar &lt;<a href="mailto:ravidreams_03@yahoo.com">ravidreams_03@yahoo.com</a>&gt; wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div><div style="font-family: arial,helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Leaving aside the wikiquette and formailities, the mediawiki software itself makes it tough for newcomers. Even one Post-Doc friend of mine could not figure out the simplest wiki syntax! People are more comfortable with WYSWYG editors. I had been watching wikipedia for last 3 years. MediaWiki has hardly shown any improvement in usability and interface. It&#39;s time more developers put in more effort in improving ease of using media wiki. Other free software around the same time frame have improved dramatically.<br>
<br>Thanks<br><font color="#888888"><br>Ravi<br></font></div><div class="WgoR0d"><br>
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