Gez
Why don't I have a custom title by now?!
Posts: 9141
Registered: 07-07 |
printz said:
Excuse me, but why is WYSIWYG considered bad? I'd rather have that than deal with convoluted (unwieldy) wiki markup to draw common elements, such as tables.
The reason is simple: they output extremely broken wikicode. Stupid things like opening and closing a tag a dozen times with nothing in between (so it's empty and not displayed, but it still takes up over a hundred characters), adding the same category twenty times, etc.
It is also fundamentally incapable to cope with templates, which are heavily used in any decent wiki, Doom wiki included, which makes them de facto useless.
People who type out their wiki code have to know how wiki code works (it's not that hard to learn), which means that they need to be computer literate and technically minded -- exactly the kind of guys you want to work on a knowledgebase about software. Wikia's efforts to maximize their userbase through WYSIWYG editors, "create an article" and "upload photos" wizards result in wikis that are cobbled together blindly by dumb kids, who
#1 don't know how to use a wiki,
#2 don't know there are policies and guidelines in place,
#3 don't know what they are talking about as they have neither the knowledge nor the motivation to check their facts,
#4 don't know how to type in intelligible English,
#5 bloat the database with useless crap because they only need to click two or three times to make it happen.
This is an elitist viewpoint, but it has been justified by what happened on the Doom wikia; where people contributed highly useful content such as "Doom weapons that look like faces" (this includes all weapons).
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01-30-12 15:20 
