On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:47 PM, Dmitriy Sintsov <questpc(a)rambler.ru> wrote:
The only really complex part of wikitext are the
templates - nested,
sometimes really weird subst and so on.
Templates and refs are by far the worst offenders, for sticking tons
of content in the page that doesn't have any obvious relationship to
the actual content. Getting rid of them would be a huge step forward.
But stuff like '''bold''' and ==headings== are also a real
problem.
Everything unexpected like that is going to increase the risk that a
new user will get worried he doesn't know what he's doing, and give up
rather than risk breaking something or put effort into figuring out
what to do. If you give *anyone*[1] a WYSIWYG interface, they'll know
how it works, because they're used to it from Word and whatnot.
That's just not true of wikitext, no matter how simple it is once you
*already* understand it.
[1] Yes, yes, I mean anyone who uses computers much at all, not
farmers in rural Africa or my maternal grandmother.