on 9/3/03 11:09 AM, Ray Saintonge at saintonge(a)telus.net wrote:
Bj wrote:
I agree that unnecessary markup is...
unnecessary. But there are two
sides of the coin, on one hand we don't want people to have to install
MS Frontpage (or whatever it is called) and have three years web
design experience. But on the other hand, most Wikipedia pages are
rather ugly and boring. They are like just text! I mean who wants to
read four pages of NPOV encyclopedic text where the most interesting
things are the paragraph breaks? :-)
The choice is between information and pretty packaging. If Wikipedia is
going to have any long term reputation it will depend on the
information, not the packaging.
But see:
http://credibility.stanford.edu/guidelines/index.html
Boring is OK. Fixing the boring should
not come at the expense of the primary purpose of the
encyclopedia. For
people with slow connections pictures can be a problem. Others who pay
by the on-line second, both to their ISP and the telephone company, may
not appreciate paying to download uninformative pretty pictures.
Furthermore, if we want to appeal to impoverished parts of the world,
we need to take into account the fact that their services are rudimentary.
I hear you, I started on the internet with a 2400 connection, I absolutely
hated commplicated websites with intensive graphics.
. So instead of letting the not so smart people
be a hinderance for
the way of the future lets make them smarter by providing good
documentation and make everything as easy as possible so that everyone
can be happy.
That's an outrageously elitist attitude. The project is not about
making people "smarter", it's about providing information. How are
these "not so smart people" a hinderance anyway? If you think that
better documentation will solve the problems you're welcome to write it.
That should not be difficult unless you are one of the "not so smart
people". ;-)
Ec
Like a lot of programming issues, it is not about being smart. It is about
having a life. If you don't fiddle around with markup a lot you are lost and
ignorant no matter how smart you are.
Fred Bauder
http://www.internet-encyclopedia.org