Wikipedia visual editor | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia visual editor

blog.wikimedia.org

64 pointsvishal012320 comments

It's a very good start. The main things that are still really lacking I think are "References" and "Transclusions". Even the word "transclusions" needs to be expelled from the interface. Nobody knows what that means, guys. Just call it "templates".

It is a very good start, and it's good that it's a clearly labelled 'beta' option. It -might- eventually make doing cites easier (especially ones that involve minor changes in existing cites), but already anyone who comes along and sees something wrong can fix typos, clumsy phrases, even repair some vandalism. It enables tens of thousands of reader eyes to do that. Major plus.

Yeah, and even for experienced editors, it's an easier tool to use for typo and grammar correction, since you can see the error in the same visual context as you first spotted it.

Editor is not sandboxed in cross domain iframe environment.

Homakov go!

Homakov used XSRF! It's super effective!

I don't understand. Can you link me to a thing that will teach me to understand, please?

Upvoted you because I am in the same boat. But some of the best hn comments are (imho) those that require some searching around before understanding them. At least I just did and got a step closer towards enlightenment :)

Use the search box at the bottom of the page on HN, or hit hnsearch.com, search for "Homakov" (click the radio button to limit to stories), and if that's not enough, add in key words from the parent post (iframe, domain, cross-domain, sandbox, etc.).

I suspect that removing having the ability to learn Wikipedia's markup language as a filter for contributors will decrease the average quality of edits. If you're incapable of learning simple patterns or closing parentheses, maybe the quality of your thinking and judgement is not that high. If so, I don't really want to read your ideas or opinions.

And I suspect you're wrong. I didn't find Wikipedia's markup language difficult, but I did find it needlessly cumbersome, plus it makes proofreading more difficult. Do you have any evidence for judging the quality of authorship by the standards of typesetters?

Just compare the average Tumblr blog to, say one produced with Jekyll, document produced with Latex vs. Word, etc.

Relatedly, making things too "easy to use" often obscures what's actually happening underneath and makes them harder to understand for certain classes of user (i.e. those that want to understand what they're actually doing).

I guess that's a no, then.

Just create a reputation system for edits. For every edit, ask it to be given a type (typo, additional info, factual correction, etc) and a quality score. Wight the value of a rating using the rating of ther rater. People who make good contributions will rise to the top. Those who make poor contributions will fall to the bottom

There are better solutions than making something needlessly complex.

Quite. I don't think that making it hard automatically makes it better, any more than I think that using vi will make you a better programmer than using [insert your favorite GUI editor here].

I'll see your opinion and raise you an anecdote.

At our business we use Confluence. The earlier versions had a proprietary wiki syntax that us technical types found easy to use but the rest of the company did not.

Confluence added a visual editor and since then the quality of the non-technical documentation in Confluence has improved, because the ability to edit it is more accessible to the people that know the most about it.

this. definitely the reason wikipedia isn't all full of crap spamm.

Spam is often added by bots anyway.

Actually that might remove some of the grunt work for experienced editors. It's a lot easier to prettify existing data than to do it all from scratch.

There's a lot more to advanced editing than "learning simple patterns". Eliminating some of the trivial editing will free experienced editors for more important tasks.

Wikipedia is not about users ideas or opinions, it's about citing ideas and opinions from authoritative sources. This isn't 2003 any more.

I don't think the complexity of the editing system has any meaningful impact on the quality of submissions. Most vandalism and content of poor quality that I've ever seen has simply been added to existing articles. Somebody does not need to be at all familiar with Wikipedia's editing system to insert a few sentences or paragraphs into an article that already exists.

There are many people out there, experts in their field, with valuable knowledge to contribute that may have a difficult time (or don't have the time/motivation for) learning how to properly format an article using the old editing system. I think the barrier to entry should be as low as possible to enable people like this to contribute as well. I don't really see why knowledge of a cryptic and proprietary text editing format should be used as a filter for people attempting to contribute information from fields that have no relation to it.

I noticed this the other day. It's pretty exciting!

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