On 9/18/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
I speak as a long-time Wikipedian who is more
interested in content than
pretty presentation. I had a hand in helping develop the early versions
of taxoboxes, and descriptive boxes for battles. To some extent the use
of charts and tables is essential for organizing data. But when we
reach a point that changing the content of these charts and boxes is a
mysterious process for the average user, or when it is only with great
difficulty that one even finds what page to edit, then we have to
consider the possibility that we have gotten away from the essential
principal that this is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
When we speak of Wikipedia as a site that anyone can edit that means
more to me than permission. That permission is hollow if a person lacks
the techniques to do it. In the earliest time we took pride in the fact
that wiki-markup was so simple that anyone could understand it; the
essentials could be put on a single page that did not even need to be
scrolled. Someone could edit without having to learn html. Can we
still honestly say that a retired professor in the arts and humanities
is still able to contribute from his vast experience? His familiarity
with his subject may be unquestionable, but his expertise preceeded the
cyber-age and did not depend on familiarity with computer languages.
I strongly disagree. Our goal here must fundamentally be to produce
an encyclopedia for the reader rather than merely to engage in the
perpetual process of editing it. Producing a high-quality
encyclopedia necessarily means allowing a somewhat more sophisticated
set of layout and content presentation tools than the retired
professor may be willing to learn -- but this is only a problem
insofar as the professor *needs* to learn those tools. Just as we do
not expect all users to be equally capable of taking high-quality
photographs, writing FAs, or any of a variety of other tasks, we
should not expect that all users will be equally capable of working on
complex issues of templatized design and layout.
The retired professor, in your example, is most likely here to
contribute content rather than to play around with the aesthetics of
little colored boxes; the overwhelming majority of his exposure to
templates will be either simply including them -- but usually there's
no shortage of volunteers to do this anyways -- or using them as black
boxes for data, like so
{{Infobox Clown
|name= John Smith
|born= January 10, 1904
|died= March 22, 1957
|country= United Kingdom
}}
There is absolutely no reason, in most cases, for said professor to
concern himself with how {{Infobox Clown}} transforms the values he
enters into a pretty table; if he's particularly interested in layout
issues, he can always ask someone for help if he can't figure things
out.
Forcing everyone else to abandon all the sophisticated presentation
tools we've developed, meanwhile, will drastically decrease the
quality of page layout in the encyclopedia, and won't help the
professor in the least, as the nice "black box" template will either
be replaced with a fragile table, or nothing at all -- neither of
which is something he'll be particularly pleased to work with, I
suspect.
--
Kirill Lokshin