3 ms·

> long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of Wikipedians The fundamental issue here seems to be that there's a select group of "Wikipedians

> long-term I bet on Wikipedia converging more on the desires of Wikipedians The fundamental issue here seems to be that there's a select group of "Wikipedians" who are the primary editors. As long as the site doesn't make editing/adding articles a more user friendly/advertised feature, things aren't going to change. Case in point: I went just yesterday to add some new content to an article, along with which I had a citation to add. Imagine my surprise when I found out that citations are still added in MediaWiki syntax! I can say without a doubt that every single acquaintance of mine who doesn't have an interest in computers (and quite a few who do) would have been utterly discouraged at this point from editing the article. How difficult can it be to add a GUI editor? It would be a small, purely technical, step that could have a significant impact on the userbase, if advertised properly.

jacobolus 14y ago
Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of resistance from the existing user base. Most GUI text editors around the web are horrible buggy piles of crap (to take one example I was recently frustrated by, the editor at Adobe’s forums – and Adobe is a gigantic company with thousands of highly paid, experienced developers). The result of any such effort could easily end up making the software more complex and harder to use rather than easier.
- MikeCapone 14y ago
  > Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of resistance from the existing user base. As one of the most popular websites on the net, it's not like they don't have the resources to do it. I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism against newbies. This probably does some good, but it also definitely does a lot of bad (keeping out worthy contributors just because they don't feel like learning the markup language). I'm sure they could achieve their goal some other way without pushing away talented contributors.
  - jacobolus 14y ago
    > it's not like they don't have the resources to do it. Have you ever looked at the Mediawiki code base? Last time I skimmed a bit, a few years ago, it was an utterly horrible mess of spaghetti PHP. Just finding developers capable of doing this would be a big challenge. The Wikimedia Foundation has a lot less resources than you might imagine, considering the reach of its projects, and there are an awful lot of other funding priorities (not to mention other code priorities). They’re doing the best they can, but making sweeping changes to the code base is a lot harder than it looks. > I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism. Do you have any evidence for that? As conspiracy theories go, this one seems pretty weak to me. I can’t think of another organization of comparable size which is as welcoming and open to involvement and contribution from ordinary community members, at all levels of decision making. Almost the entire management and operation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation is carried out in public, nearly all of the parties involved are volunteers (with a quite small number of full time staff keeping infrastructure running, handling legal issues, and so on), and many many decisions are made collectively, by consensus. It’s easy to hate on anything, as a disinterested outsider, without making any real attempt to understand the internal processes involved, but organizing millions of people is a highly non-trivial job, and I think the Wikimedia community has done pretty admirably, all things considered.
    - waterlesscloud 14y ago
      "Just finding developers capable of doing this would be a big challenge." I'm pretty sure one of the very highest profile websites on the entire internet could find developers capable of handling it. Actually, I'm 100% certain of it.
      - jacobolus 14y ago
        Send them over. I’m sure the Wikimedia foundation would be glad to have them: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings Edit: From the Wikimedia Foundation’s “2011–2012 Annual Plan”: > 2011-12 Risks: > 1) Editor decline is an intractable problem. Declining participation is by far the most serious problem facing the Wikimedia projects: the success of the projects is entirely dependent upon a thriving, healthy editing community. We are responding with a multi-faceted approach that blends big obvious fixes (e.g., Visual Editor) with more experimental approaches (e.g., the -1 to 100 retention projects and editor recruitment initiatives in India and Brazil). The WMF is also putting resources towards expanding community awareness and understanding of the problem, and putting in place mechanisms for decentralized community innovation so that community initiatives can help to solve it. We will be tracking progress throughout the year, and if necessary will sacrifice other activities to increase resources dedicated to this. [...] > 9) A shortage of Silicon Valley technical talent hurts our ability to recruit and retain technical staff. The Bay Area is currently facing a major shortage of talented engineers, and tech companies are finding it difficult to hire and retain good tech staff. This could impair our ability to grow our tech staff as planned from 28 to 50. Mitigation: Like the rest of the tech sector, there is not much we can do to mitigate this serious problem. However, we will dedicate more resources towards technical recruitment in 2011-12 compared with 2010-11, and we'll be very clear about our value proposition: The Wikimedia Foundation is not about monetizing eyeballs, our direction isn't set by VCs, and we're financially stable. We offer a fair, friendly, fun environment for talented engineers who want their individual contribution to result in making the world a better place for hundreds of millions of people. [...] > THE 2011-12 PLAN [...] > Key activities supporting Priority #2, Diversifying the Editor Community are: > 1) Visual Editor: A new default editing environment for Wikimedia projects which does not require markup. [...] > 2011-12 Plan Targets [...] > 5) Develop Visual Editor. First opt-in user-facing production usage by December 2011, and first small wiki default deployment by June 2012. [...] > The 2011-12 plan reflects our continued desire to grow the organization's programmatic capacity by growing its staff, with an emphasis on thoughtful recruitment and integration of new people. In 2011-12, we plan to grow staff 50% from 78 to 117.
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  If there's one site that needs a GUI editor, it's Wikipedia. Like MikeCapone said, it's not like they don't have the resources. It's something that should've been started on years ago. > to take one example I was recently frustrated by, the editor at Adobe’s forums – and Adobe is a gigantic company with thousands of highly paid, experienced developers I don't personally know any Adobe employees, but my (albeit limited) experience with Adobe software, such as Flash and Acrobat, certainly triggers descriptions such as "horrible buggy piece of crap."
  - jacobolus 14y ago
    If you think adding a GUI editor to Wikipedia is a top priority, you should try to either do some community organizing to push for it, or try diving into the code to get some idea of how hard it would be to add. More than most institutions, Wikipedia is quite open and democratic and it’s possible for regular contributors to have a big impact, if they’re willing to put the work in. Making a change like this will be a huge amount of work for someone, which is why it hasn’t happened yet. But if you can gather a team of like-minded folks, with enough dedicated organizing/coding effort I’m sure you could make some good progress.
- vacri 14y ago
  Atlassian recently stripped the wikisyntax editor from their wiki, forcing the editor to be a newbie-friendly WYSIWYG GUI that's not really WYSIWYG (it uses a lot of incorrect size placeholders). Thing is, it is easier for newbie users... but the data structures are insanely more generic and it's much harder to make the data on your page fit in a way that's consumable for the reader. Worst of all, it doesn't handle old wikisyntax pages at all well, so if you need to update an old table, it can cause problems. A good GUI editor is one that produces good output - and that is really hard to do, particularly in the constrained space of a webpage.
cocoflunchy 14y ago
The GUI editor is under (active?) development. You can try it here in a sandbox : http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox More info here : http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor
mjn 14y ago
> The fundamental issue here seems to be that there's a select group of "Wikipedians" who are the primary editors. It's actually not clear that's true when it comes to primary writers. There are a group of active editors (about 3000 at any given time) who do much of the maintenance work, e.g. putting articles into categories, formatting references, editing for style, moving stuff around, adding infoboxes, etc. But at least one study (I'll see if I can dig it up) found that a surprising percentage of the total content on Wikipedia is written by random anonymous IP addresses that show up to write a few paragraphs on a subject and are then never seen again.
- petitmiam 14y ago
  I'd love to see that study. For some reason the idea of anonymous people writing bits and pieces, makes me like Wikipedia more.

jacobolus 14y ago

Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of resistance from the existing user base. Most GUI text editors around the web are horrible buggy piles of crap (to take one example I was recently frustrated by, the editor at Adobe’s forums – and Adobe is a gigantic company with thousands of highly paid, experienced developers). The result of any such effort could easily end up making the software more complex and harder to use rather than easier.

MikeCapone 14y ago
> Adding a good GUI editor properly integrated into Mediawiki would take at least a man year of effort by skilled programmers, I would guess. It would be a huge, extremely difficult technical step, with a large amount of resistance from the existing user base. As one of the most popular websites on the net, it's not like they don't have the resources to do it. I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism against newbies. This probably does some good, but it also definitely does a lot of bad (keeping out worthy contributors just because they don't feel like learning the markup language). I'm sure they could achieve their goal some other way without pushing away talented contributors.
- jacobolus 14y ago
  > it's not like they don't have the resources to do it. Have you ever looked at the Mediawiki code base? Last time I skimmed a bit, a few years ago, it was an utterly horrible mess of spaghetti PHP. Just finding developers capable of doing this would be a big challenge. The Wikimedia Foundation has a lot less resources than you might imagine, considering the reach of its projects, and there are an awful lot of other funding priorities (not to mention other code priorities). They’re doing the best they can, but making sweeping changes to the code base is a lot harder than it looks. > I think there are powerful members of the community who want to keep it somewhat insular and closed off as a defense mechanism. Do you have any evidence for that? As conspiracy theories go, this one seems pretty weak to me. I can’t think of another organization of comparable size which is as welcoming and open to involvement and contribution from ordinary community members, at all levels of decision making. Almost the entire management and operation of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation is carried out in public, nearly all of the parties involved are volunteers (with a quite small number of full time staff keeping infrastructure running, handling legal issues, and so on), and many many decisions are made collectively, by consensus. It’s easy to hate on anything, as a disinterested outsider, without making any real attempt to understand the internal processes involved, but organizing millions of people is a highly non-trivial job, and I think the Wikimedia community has done pretty admirably, all things considered.
  - waterlesscloud 14y ago
    "Just finding developers capable of doing this would be a big challenge." I'm pretty sure one of the very highest profile websites on the entire internet could find developers capable of handling it. Actually, I'm 100% certain of it.
    - jacobolus 14y ago
      Send them over. I’m sure the Wikimedia foundation would be glad to have them: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings Edit: From the Wikimedia Foundation’s “2011–2012 Annual Plan”: > 2011-12 Risks: > 1) Editor decline is an intractable problem. Declining participation is by far the most serious problem facing the Wikimedia projects: the success of the projects is entirely dependent upon a thriving, healthy editing community. We are responding with a multi-faceted approach that blends big obvious fixes (e.g., Visual Editor) with more experimental approaches (e.g., the -1 to 100 retention projects and editor recruitment initiatives in India and Brazil). The WMF is also putting resources towards expanding community awareness and understanding of the problem, and putting in place mechanisms for decentralized community innovation so that community initiatives can help to solve it. We will be tracking progress throughout the year, and if necessary will sacrifice other activities to increase resources dedicated to this. [...] > 9) A shortage of Silicon Valley technical talent hurts our ability to recruit and retain technical staff. The Bay Area is currently facing a major shortage of talented engineers, and tech companies are finding it difficult to hire and retain good tech staff. This could impair our ability to grow our tech staff as planned from 28 to 50. Mitigation: Like the rest of the tech sector, there is not much we can do to mitigate this serious problem. However, we will dedicate more resources towards technical recruitment in 2011-12 compared with 2010-11, and we'll be very clear about our value proposition: The Wikimedia Foundation is not about monetizing eyeballs, our direction isn't set by VCs, and we're financially stable. We offer a fair, friendly, fun environment for talented engineers who want their individual contribution to result in making the world a better place for hundreds of millions of people. [...] > THE 2011-12 PLAN [...] > Key activities supporting Priority #2, Diversifying the Editor Community are: > 1) Visual Editor: A new default editing environment for Wikimedia projects which does not require markup. [...] > 2011-12 Plan Targets [...] > 5) Develop Visual Editor. First opt-in user-facing production usage by December 2011, and first small wiki default deployment by June 2012. [...] > The 2011-12 plan reflects our continued desire to grow the organization's programmatic capacity by growing its staff, with an emphasis on thoughtful recruitment and integration of new people. In 2011-12, we plan to grow staff 50% from 78 to 117.
w1ntermute 14y ago
If there's one site that needs a GUI editor, it's Wikipedia. Like MikeCapone said, it's not like they don't have the resources. It's something that should've been started on years ago. > to take one example I was recently frustrated by, the editor at Adobe’s forums – and Adobe is a gigantic company with thousands of highly paid, experienced developers I don't personally know any Adobe employees, but my (albeit limited) experience with Adobe software, such as Flash and Acrobat, certainly triggers descriptions such as "horrible buggy piece of crap."
- jacobolus 14y ago
  If you think adding a GUI editor to Wikipedia is a top priority, you should try to either do some community organizing to push for it, or try diving into the code to get some idea of how hard it would be to add. More than most institutions, Wikipedia is quite open and democratic and it’s possible for regular contributors to have a big impact, if they’re willing to put the work in. Making a change like this will be a huge amount of work for someone, which is why it hasn’t happened yet. But if you can gather a team of like-minded folks, with enough dedicated organizing/coding effort I’m sure you could make some good progress.
vacri 14y ago
Atlassian recently stripped the wikisyntax editor from their wiki, forcing the editor to be a newbie-friendly WYSIWYG GUI that's not really WYSIWYG (it uses a lot of incorrect size placeholders). Thing is, it is easier for newbie users... but the data structures are insanely more generic and it's much harder to make the data on your page fit in a way that's consumable for the reader. Worst of all, it doesn't handle old wikisyntax pages at all well, so if you need to update an old table, it can cause problems. A good GUI editor is one that produces good output - and that is really hard to do, particularly in the constrained space of a webpage.

cocoflunchy 14y ago

The GUI editor is under (active?) development. You can try it here in a sandbox : http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox More info here : http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor

mjn 14y ago

> The fundamental issue here seems to be that there's a select group of "Wikipedians" who are the primary editors. It's actually not clear that's true when it comes to primary writers. There are a group of active editors (about 3000 at any given time) who do much of the maintenance work, e.g. putting articles into categories, formatting references, editing for style, moving stuff around, adding infoboxes, etc. But at least one study (I'll see if I can dig it up) found that a surprising percentage of the total content on Wikipedia is written by random anonymous IP addresses that show up to write a few paragraphs on a subject and are then never seen again.

petitmiam 14y ago
I'd love to see that study. For some reason the idea of anonymous people writing bits and pieces, makes me like Wikipedia more.