3 ms·

I'll toss my own experience out there. I've contributed edits to maybe a dozen or so different Wikipedia articles, and would like to contribute more, but it's

I'll toss my own experience out there. I've contributed edits to maybe a dozen or so different Wikipedia articles, and would like to contribute more, but it's hard to get past a couple of hurdles. The main one is the byzantine and archaic editing tools. The markdown language that Wikipedia uses is a PITA to learn, and following a discussion on the talk page is almost impossible. Wikipedia presents a wonderful UX for browsing and reading. It has perhaps the worst UX I've ever seen for a beginner who wants to make a contribution. Beyond that, I spent a significant amount of time editing some articles on a fringe religious group that I had studied extensively. (Apart from the group's own leaders, I arguably knew more about the group than anyone else in the world.) But the group that was the focus of the article kept backing out my edits and replacing them with propaganda. It was simply too much work to fight them (especially with the horrible edit/discussion tools), they were a lot more motivated than I was, and I eventually gave up.

massysett 11y ago
This is the worst thing about Wikipedia. Experts with actual knowledge are discouraged and ridiculed while those who have built up longevity through tenacity retain control even if they know nothing.
- gedy 11y ago
  Sounds like most companies I've worked for :-)
quadrangle 11y ago
Talk pages should not themselves be wiki pages. This is the result of all that MVP stuff people go on about. Wikipedia had wikis, they didn't have discussion boards. They needed discussion boards. MVP was to use another wiki page for discussions, and that evolved into the stupidness we see today. Talk and discussion are completely different process than collaborative editing, and they demand different tools. I also agree about the markup (it's markUP. "Markdown" is a specific type of markup language which, despite its flaws, probably is the easiest and now most common one)
- jessriedel 11y ago
  MVP?
  - bgilroy26 11y ago
    Maybe MVP is being used as a calling card for the concept of iterating on a prototype in general? Lean startup methodology was an inheritor of common wisdom such as "worse is better" and "best is the enemy of the good" but they're all in the same family tree.
  - nolok 11y ago
    Minimum viable product. In this case, "hey we need a way for people to talk to each other", "sure, we should make a discussion tool, but to get it right now we could use a wiki page that users edit one after another to add their answers". The fact that it started as such is not an issue per se, but after so many years wikipedia should have replaced it with something better and easier.
cetacea 11y ago
If Markdown were around (and widely used) when MediaWiki was written, I imagine there would have been a push to use it as the markup language for MediaWiki. I don't see MediaWiki markup as byzantine or archaic, except for whatever half-assed LaTeX processor they use. It seems to only recognize some random subset of features from various ams packages. Why they don't just use a fully-featured TeX distro is beyond me. Wikipedia's talk page workflow (indenting to start a new comment, then inserting a special image to wrap around to the margin once too many indents have accumulated) is moronic.

massysett 11y ago

This is the worst thing about Wikipedia. Experts with actual knowledge are discouraged and ridiculed while those who have built up longevity through tenacity retain control even if they know nothing.

gedy 11y ago
Sounds like most companies I've worked for :-)

quadrangle 11y ago

Talk pages should not themselves be wiki pages. This is the result of all that MVP stuff people go on about. Wikipedia had wikis, they didn't have discussion boards. They needed discussion boards. MVP was to use another wiki page for discussions, and that evolved into the stupidness we see today. Talk and discussion are completely different process than collaborative editing, and they demand different tools. I also agree about the markup (it's markUP. "Markdown" is a specific type of markup language which, despite its flaws, probably is the easiest and now most common one)

jessriedel 11y ago
MVP?
- bgilroy26 11y ago
  Maybe MVP is being used as a calling card for the concept of iterating on a prototype in general? Lean startup methodology was an inheritor of common wisdom such as "worse is better" and "best is the enemy of the good" but they're all in the same family tree.
- nolok 11y ago
  Minimum viable product. In this case, "hey we need a way for people to talk to each other", "sure, we should make a discussion tool, but to get it right now we could use a wiki page that users edit one after another to add their answers". The fact that it started as such is not an issue per se, but after so many years wikipedia should have replaced it with something better and easier.

cetacea 11y ago

If Markdown were around (and widely used) when MediaWiki was written, I imagine there would have been a push to use it as the markup language for MediaWiki. I don't see MediaWiki markup as byzantine or archaic, except for whatever half-assed LaTeX processor they use. It seems to only recognize some random subset of features from various ams packages. Why they don't just use a fully-featured TeX distro is beyond me. Wikipedia's talk page workflow (indenting to start a new comment, then inserting a special image to wrap around to the margin once too many indents have accumulated) is moronic.