Comment by alliejanoch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alliejanoch | Hacker News Reader

I think this article buries the real reason women don't contribute at the very end. Wikipedia's efforts to make the editing interface more friendly to non developers has been strongly opposed by the community. I think this is often the case with strong community based products, when working at Fickr I saw that many changes aimed at attracting new users were met with serious objections from most active community members. Balancing the desire to please existing community members with the desire to gain new members is never easy.

We all know that women make up a small fraction of the developer community, so it should come as no surprise that women haven't contributed much to a product that has historically required a little understanding of "programming" in order to edit (of course it don't seem like programming to developers, but to non developers it is scary). With an easy to use interface for editing articles, that is strongly advertised and pushed (despite community objections), Wikipedia could start to make headway with gaining women editors, but overcoming history is not going to be easy.

As a very casual Wikipedia committer (less than half a dozen articles ever, and a handful more edits) who also happens to be a programmer, I agree. Every single time I go to edit a Wikipedia article or make a new one I have to spend ten minutes familiarising myself again with the markup.

Just go read up on this page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Wiki_markup

Even for a very basic article that won't be immediately nuked you'll need to know a lot of that including how to correctly cite, link to sub-sections, other Wikipedia articles, and so on.

I can honestly see that being a barrier to entry.

I think this is a problem with "markdown-style" HTML editing in general. Sites that use it seem to think that using their special markup language is somehow easier for newbies to use than vanilla HTML, just because it doesn't have angle-brackets.

IMHO, markdown etc. solve one problem only: when you need to have text that is easily readable by humans, but can also be easily converted to HTML. In a content-entry situation, it just seems to solve the problem of saving keystrokes for people that already know HTML.

What I think average users really need is a WYSIWYG editor (which, I'll be the first to admit, is a real PITA for generating sane HTML).

But Wikipedia has a really strict set of possible layouts, so actually, a WYSIWYG editor would make tons of sense, would probably be easy to create, and would generate really clean HTML.

Markdown etc. solves another problem as well: HTML is a complicated system with multiple standards and different interpreters for that standard, which oh by the way most of them WILL parse certain parts of it as a Turing-complete programming language. There's a lot of reasons not to want untrusted users to be able to input HTML, which is why you may want to have users input a much safer language that you can convert to HTML.

That's a good point.

Serious idea: Maybe a WYSIWYG editor that generated markdown, which you could then submit to the server to parse as HTML?

From what I recall, their efforts were strongly opposed by the community in large part because they were imposed on it despite being spectacularly broken, difficult to use, and leaving damage behind that other editors had to clean up. (Also, women are not idiots and are in fact quite capable of comprehending things like wiki markup.)

Barriers to entry such as wiki markup are rarely about whether a group of people are theoretically capable of doing something. The larger problem is that an article about [x] will now only be started/improved by the cross-section of people who both care about [x] and are willing to spend time on the unrelated concept of wiki markup.

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