<story><title>Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor</title><url>https://medium.com/@MrJamesFisher/wikipedia-needs-an-ide-not-a-wysiwyg-editor-7acd85b582c8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tottenhm</author><text>&amp;quot;Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn&amp;#x27;t have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make it less rewarding to participate (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&amp;#x2F;featuredstory&amp;#x2F;520446&amp;#x2F;the-dec...&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;p&gt;(Edit: Not trying to be negative -- the suggestions in the article sound cool anyway.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alialkhatib</author><text>I was also somewhat skeptical of the author&amp;#x27;s claim that the barrier to entry for Wikipedia editors was the editor itself. I&amp;#x27;ve read a few papers concluding that Wikipedia contributions are declining because of the community pushing out people who don&amp;#x27;t understand the &lt;i&gt;many&lt;/i&gt; rules that have been developed[1], or in other cases because editors have gotten into turf wars over articles they feel some sense of ownership over[2]. Meanwhile, I haven&amp;#x27;t read anything concluding that the editing environment was a strong deterrent (although I haven&amp;#x27;t been looking, so I could be willfully blind).&lt;p&gt;Edit: &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; articles identifying interpersonal friction as the leading factor deterring would-be editors [3,4]. At this point I&amp;#x27;m suspicious of the author&amp;#x27;s due diligence in studying the problem, making the proposed solution more dubious.&lt;p&gt;[1] Suh, Bongwon, et al. &amp;quot;The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia.&amp;quot; Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. ACM, 2009.&lt;p&gt;[2] Thom-Santelli, Jennifer, Dan R. Cosley, and Geri Gay. &amp;quot;What&amp;#x27;s mine is mine: territoriality in collaborative authoring.&amp;quot; Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2009.&lt;p&gt;[3] Kittur, Aniket, and Robert E. Kraut. &amp;quot;Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination.&amp;quot; Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, 2008.&lt;p&gt;[4] Halfaker, Aaron, Aniket Kittur, and John Riedl. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#x27;t bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work.&amp;quot; Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration. ACM, 2011.</text></comment>
<story><title>Wikipedia needs an IDE, not a WYSIWYG editor</title><url>https://medium.com/@MrJamesFisher/wikipedia-needs-an-ide-not-a-wysiwyg-editor-7acd85b582c8</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tottenhm</author><text>&amp;quot;Users apparently dislike this workflow so much that they don’t bother contributing at all: significantly less people are editing Wikipedia than did a few years ago.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;To be fair, I think this exaggerates the role of the editing UI -- if the editing UI was that bad, then people wouldn&amp;#x27;t have contributed in the first place. The more common narrative for reduced participation is the growth of cultural issues which make it less rewarding to participate (e.g. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.technologyreview.com&amp;#x2F;featuredstory&amp;#x2F;520446&amp;#x2F;the-dec...&lt;/a&gt; ).&lt;p&gt;(Edit: Not trying to be negative -- the suggestions in the article sound cool anyway.)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bjelkeman-again</author><text>As you say, dealing with the UI is fine. Dealing with the bureaucrats isn&amp;#x27;t. Having your account banned and your new article marked for spam by a very abrasive person, when trying to add legitimate content, rather than being supported through the maze of rules, as happened to a colleague the other day. That is a problem which stops meaningful content being added.</text></comment>