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Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages)

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gtisza at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 4:33 AM

Post #1 of 14 (908 views)
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Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages)

Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist <at> gmail.com> writes:
> Wikitext is not easy to edit.

It is easy enough to edit for power users, who make the large majority of edits;
and way more comfortable than WYSIWYG. Wikis require a certain hacker mentality
- not in the technical sense, but a desire to understand things in depth. It
takes effort to learn the syntax, but once you did, it gives you freedom and
effectiveness, because you are actually in control of things (as opposed to rich
text editors which sometimes do something similar to what you intended, at other
times not even close, because they use some fucked-up internal representation
that you have no way of knowing or understanding). This might be a problem for
Wikia with its fanboi target demographic that has the attention span of a Naruto
episode, but Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and writing a good encyclopedia
article requires hacker mentality in the first place, so whatever.

And then there is the ecosystem of bots, gadgets and other third-party tools
which is based on wikitext, and not only would moving away from wikitext a huge
maintenance burden, but again it would be replaced with something that is way
less intuitive and actually harder to use (simple text operations are somewhat
easier than fooling around with document trees).

So if you can do WYSIWYG on top of wikitext, cool (the learning curve is
certainly steep for new users, and that will only become worse as new features
are added). If you can do a sort of WYSIWYM with syntax highlighting,
context-sensitive help and wizards for the more inconvenient elements like
templates, that is even better, because it wouldn't create a gap between people
using WYSIWYG and wikitext, and would allow for a gradual learning experience.
But replacing wikitext with some sort of internal representation that is
unreadable for humans would be a huge mistake IMO.

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dgerard at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 5:36 AM

Post #2 of 14 (873 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

2009/9/24 Tisza Gergő <gtisza [at] gmail>:

> It is easy enough to edit for power users, who make the large majority of edits;
> and way more comfortable than WYSIWYG.

Much as vim is more powerful than Notepad.

However, impenetrable wikitext is one of *the* greatest barriers to
new users on Wikimedia projects. And this impenetrability is not, in
any way whatsoever or by any twists of logic, a feature.

- d.

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grinapo at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 5:44 AM

Post #3 of 14 (871 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 14:36, David Gerard <dgerard [at] gmail> wrote:

> However, impenetrable wikitext is one of *the* greatest barriers to
> new users on Wikimedia projects. And this impenetrability is not, in
> any way whatsoever or by any twists of logic, a feature.

Adding a gui layer to wikitext is always okay, as long as it's
possible to get rid of, since majority of edits not coming from "new
users", and losing flexibility for power users to get more newbies
doesn't sound like a good deal to me.

At least all of the GUIs I've seen were slow and hard to use, and
resulted unwanted (side) effects if something even barely complex were
entered. And this isn't the problem of Wikipedia: google docs, which
is one of the most advanced web-based gui systems I guess have plenty
of usability problems, which only can be fixed by messing with the
Source. And many core people want to mess with the source.

So, adding a newbie layer is okay as long as you don't mess up the
work of the non-newbies.

g

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Simetrical+wikilist at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 7:27 AM

Post #4 of 14 (861 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Tisza Gergő <gtisza [at] gmail> wrote:
> It is easy enough to edit for power users, who make the large majority of edits;

Retention of existing users is not a problem. We don't have to worry
that a significant number of dedicated contributors will leave because
of a switch to WYSIWYG. They are, by hypothesis, dedicated. On the
other hand, new users being reluctant to contribute due to wikitext is
a demonstrable and serious problem.

I also contest your implication that power users will uniformly or
even mostly prefer wikitext to WYSIWYG. I'm a power user by any
standard, but I use WYSIWYG wherever possible.

Last I heard, by the way, even now most actual *content* is added by
occasional contributors. Power users may have more edits, but that
doesn't mean they're the most important ones.

Of course, I should emphasize that ideally we should keep everyone
happy. But making Wikipedia easier to edit for new users is *much*
more important than making it easier for established editors. It will
*always* be easier for established users to edit than new users, and
established editors require a lot less coddling than new editors.

> Wikis require a certain hacker mentality
> - not in the technical sense, but a desire to understand things in depth.

No, they don't. One of the core principles of wikis is eliminating
barriers to entry. Ten thousand people who each fix one typo a month
are a tremendously valuable resource even if none of them ever
contribute more. But many of them will -- *if* you can lure them into
making those typo fixes to begin with. Which you can't, if they're
scared off by the fixed-width text with random incomprehensible
punctuation thrown in everywhere that has no obvious relationship to
the article's actual content.

> And then there is the ecosystem of bots, gadgets and other third-party tools
> which is based on wikitext, and not only would moving away from wikitext a huge
> maintenance burden, but again it would be replaced with something that is way
> less intuitive and actually harder to use (simple text operations are somewhat
> easier than fooling around with document trees).

Are you arguing here that it's easier for *bots* to edit wikitext than
XML? Because that seems to be what you're saying, but I don't
understand how that would make any sense. Wikitext is unparseable,
bots have to resort to fragile regexes and hope they mostly work.

> But replacing wikitext with some sort of internal representation that is
> unreadable for humans would be a huge mistake IMO.

It's not going to happen anytime soon in any case.

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smolensk at eunet

Sep 24, 2009, 7:40 AM

Post #5 of 14 (871 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG [In reply to]

Tisza Gergő wrote:
> Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist <at> gmail.com> writes:
>> Wikitext is not easy to edit.
>
> It is easy enough to edit for power users, who make the large majority of edits;
>
> And then there is the ecosystem of bots, gadgets and other third-party tools

One more thing: wikitext diffs are more easily viewable than XML or HTML
diffs would be, especially after they would be mangled by a WYSIWYG editor.

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rarohde at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 8:20 AM

Post #6 of 14 (861 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 7:27 AM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail> wrote:
<snip>

> Last I heard, by the way, even now most actual *content* is added by
> occasional contributors. �Power users may have more edits, but that
> doesn't mean they're the most important ones.

<snip>

It may depend on your definition of "occasional contributor" and
"power user", but the way I tend to think about such distinctions
would suggest your statement is false. I've never been able to do the
analysis directly for enwiki, because it is too large and lacks
appropriate dumps, but looking at other large Wikipedias suggests that
as a rule of thumb about 70% of article content (measured by character
count) comes from accounts with more than 1000 edits to articles.
Only ~15% of content originates from people with 100 article edits or
less. In practice, adding sentences, paragraphs, sections, and
entirely new articles, is something that most people have to ease
their way into. In addition, young editors who try to add large
blocks of text too early in their career often find their content is
reverted because of writing style or formatting problems. So, the
creation of new blocks of content tends to be primarily accomplished
by experienced editors.

You are right that the multitude of drive-by editors willing to do
spell checking and make other small edits is a great resource, and
should be encouraged. However, I would suggest that for the expansion
and long-term development of Wikipedia it is the retention of existing
power users and the development of new ones that is most important.

However, making it easier for people to first start editing should
also ultimately lead to more potential power editors, so I think the
goals are generally compatible. There is no reason why making it
easier for newbies should ever be anything other than a net benefit to
everyone.

-Robert Rohde

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Simetrical+wikilist at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 12:30 PM

Post #7 of 14 (870 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 11:20 AM, rarohde <rarohde [at] gmail> wrote:
> It may depend on your definition of "occasional contributor" and
> "power user", but the way I tend to think about such distinctions
> would suggest your statement is false. I've never been able to do the
> analysis directly for enwiki, because it is too large and lacks
> appropriate dumps, but looking at other large Wikipedias suggests that
> as a rule of thumb about 70% of article content (measured by character
> count) comes from accounts with more than 1000 edits to articles.
> Only ~15% of content originates from people with 100 article edits or
> less.

Do these statistics take into account things like vandalism
reversions? Also, how do they handle anonymous users -- are they
summed up by edit count like anyone else? I distinctly remember
seeing a study conclude that most of the actual content comes from
users with few edits, but I can't recall where or how long ago
(possibly two or three years).

Regardless, the point remains that heavy contributors only exist
because they started out as new users. Just because you're a power
user type of person doesn't mean you'll be less daunted by wikimarkup
if you've never seen it before -- any barrier to entry is a problem.
(Otherwise, why not require registration too? That's probably
*easier* than understanding wikimarkup for most people.) And of
course, a lot of contributors that Wikipedia would really like to
encourage are people like academics in the humanities, say, who can't
be expected to be particularly comfortable with computers. How much
of the bias toward science and technology in Wikipedia is because of
wikimarkup?

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dgerard at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 12:50 PM

Post #8 of 14 (864 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

2009/9/24 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail>:

> Do these statistics take into account things like vandalism
> reversions? Also, how do they handle anonymous users -- are they
> summed up by edit count like anyone else? I distinctly remember
> seeing a study conclude that most of the actual content comes from
> users with few edits, but I can't recall where or how long ago
> (possibly two or three years).

Aaron Swartz.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia

Most of the edits are done by a very small group of regulars.

But most of the actual text is contributed by drive-by contributors
and then beaten into shape by the regulars.

- d.

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stevagewp at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 1:42 PM

Post #9 of 14 (856 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 10:44 PM, Peter Gervai <grinapo [at] gmail> wrote:
> Adding a gui layer to wikitext is always okay, as long as it's
> possible to get rid of, since majority of edits not coming from "new
> users", and losing flexibility for power users to get more newbies
> doesn't sound like a good deal to me.

There does seem to be a common presumption that "us old-timers" would
switch off the WYSIWYG and get straight into the wikitext. Speaking
for myself though, I'd love a good interface where I didn't feel
compelled to do that. I hate the amount of time it takes just to find
the point I want to edit. I'd love to be able to hide all the wikitext
that I'm not right in the process of editing. I can't really picture
such a beast yet, but hopefully someone else can.

Steve

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rarohde at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 3:26 PM

Post #10 of 14 (865 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 12:50 PM, David Gerard <dgerard [at] gmail> wrote:
> 2009/9/24 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist [at] gmail>:
>
>> Do these statistics take into account things like vandalism
>> reversions? �Also, how do they handle anonymous users -- are they
>> summed up by edit count like anyone else? �I distinctly remember
>> seeing a study conclude that most of the actual content comes from
>> users with few edits, but I can't recall where or how long ago
>> (possibly two or three years).
>
>
> Aaron Swartz.
>
> http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia
>
> Most of the edits are done by a very small group of regulars.
>
> But most of the actual text is contributed by drive-by contributors
> and then beaten into shape by the regulars.

Yes, I have seen that too. My analysis, using a blame engine against
a Wikipedia's full history, suggests that Aaron's thesis is simply not
true in general. There could be any number of reasons he got a
different result. For example he looked at only one article
discussing a fairly well known person, which may not have been
representative of the bulk of Wiki cotnent, or things may be different
in English rather than say Russian (one of the wikis I used), or
things may have changed since 2006. Whatever the reason, my
conclusion is that the core, highly-active community (perhaps 25,000
accounts on a site the size of enwiki) contributes more than 50% of
the currently displayed text.

To answer Aryeh, yes, I paid attention to handling vandalism
reversions, and yes anons were tracked as if they were users.

I went into it expecting a result like that described in the blog
post, and came out with the opposite conclusion.

-Robert Rohde

PS. A full write-up of this analysis has been on my to-do list for a while now.

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dgerard at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 3:37 PM

Post #11 of 14 (867 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

2009/9/24 Robert Rohde <rarohde [at] gmail>:

> I went into it expecting a result like that described in the blog
> post, and came out with the opposite conclusion.
> PS. A full write-up of this analysis has been on my to-do list for a while now.

If you could do it sooner rather than later, that would be of
tremendous utility, because this would constitute a surprising result
- Aaron's analysis is the current one. Aaron would be interested too,
I'm quite sure!

- d.

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jacopo.corbetta at gmail

Sep 24, 2009, 5:34 PM

Post #12 of 14 (856 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 05:44, Peter Gervai <grinapo [at] gmail> wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 14:36, David Gerard <dgerard [at] gmail> wrote:
>
>> However, impenetrable wikitext is one of *the* greatest barriers to
>> new users on Wikimedia projects. And this impenetrability is not, in
>> any way whatsoever or by any twists of logic, a feature.
>
> Adding a gui layer to wikitext is always okay, as long as it's
> possible to get rid of, since majority of edits not coming from "new
> users", and losing flexibility for power users to get more newbies
> doesn't sound like a good deal to me.
>
> At least all of the GUIs I've seen were slow and hard to use, and
> resulted unwanted (side) effects if something even barely complex were
> entered. And this isn't the problem of Wikipedia: google docs, which
> is one of the most advanced web-based gui systems I guess have plenty
> of usability problems, which only can be fixed by messing with the
> Source. And many core people want to mess with the source.
>
> So, adding a newbie layer is okay as long as you don't mess up the
> work of the non-newbies.

I totally agree with this analysis, and that's what brought us to
write MeanEditor. Unfortunately I don't have much time to work on it
right now (it was part of a much bigger wiki project which never came
to light), so it's just a prototype.

It would be valuable if someone with a lot of wiki experience could
write a list of what can be considered "basic" wikitext. That is,
syntax that newbies can be reasonably expected to understand and
manipulate through a (visual) editor. My list is at
<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MeanEditor#Details>.

I also want to share a funny fact with you: we have a sandbox on which
anyone can test the editor. For some reason, a _lot_ of people expect
to be able to write HTML code in wikitext (maybe they are implementing
a CMS and are used to HTML coding?). Some even write stuff like
"<h2>heading</h2>" and then complain that the editor lets them enter
the text (of course, it's valid wikitext after all), but not edit it
afterwards (HTML-style headings do not show up in the TOC, an odd
wikitext feature which we surely don't want newbies to use).
It might be useful to have a list of these "common mistakes" and show
a warning ("Do you really want a non-TOC heading? Use == heading ==
otherwise.").

I'm not sure if the Usability team is working on this. They ran a
visual editor survey some time ago, but right now they are probably
working on more urgent matters.
-- Jacopo

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Simetrical+wikilist at gmail

Sep 25, 2009, 6:33 AM

Post #13 of 14 (862 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG (was: Proposal for editing template calls within pages) [In reply to]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Jacopo Corbetta
<jacopo.corbetta [at] gmail> wrote:
> (HTML-style headings do not show up in the TOC, an odd
> wikitext feature which we surely don't want newbies to use).

HTML-style headings do show up in the TOC, and have for a few years as
far as I know.

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Platonides at gmail

Sep 25, 2009, 2:13 PM

Post #14 of 14 (851 views)
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Re: Wikitext vs. WYSIWYG [In reply to]

Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 8:34 PM, Jacopo Corbetta
> <jacopo.corbetta [at] gmail> wrote:
>> (HTML-style headings do not show up in the TOC, an odd
>> wikitext feature which we surely don't want newbies to use).
>
> HTML-style headings do show up in the TOC, and have for a few years as
> far as I know.

HTML heading have changed status several times.
Currently, they are shown in TOC, but don't have edit link.

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