Think & Play
Thoughtplay is the creative team behind various popular websites and other projects. At this blog we give away bright ideas regularly, and comment on interesting trends both online and off. The thought channel is for more business-related trends, play looks at entertainment and leisure, and thoughtplay introduces our own creative ideas, as well as news about our projects.
It's not so hard to hunt and peck | 210207
Is democracy better for having constraints upon it?
We're not brave enough to discuss this in political terms, but here's a smaller-scale instance of the tension between freedom and constraint. Marketing blog Below the Line recently asked Is HTML the new typing? (hat-tip to Seamus McCauley for the link), making an analogy between the transition between typing as a specialist province and typing as a general skill without which people would be disadvantaged. Popular web services such as Blogger and MySpace, although straightforward to use, expect at least a basic understanding of the markup concept.
Meanwhile, somewhat on the other side of the fence, is Jason Calacanis, who says Wikipedia keeps contributors out by what he calls 'technological obscurification', demanding familiarity with specialist MediaWiki markup. One of the comments at Calacanis.com also draws the typing analogy, reminding us of when keyboards were originally made to slow people down rather than speed them up.
We commented ourselves recently on the participation inequality of user-generated content in general, but concluded that at least people now have the option to participate, which is more than they did in the past. We'll say it again now. Markup is a simple concept to grasp, but also, we suspect, an effective gatekeeper to put off people with only an idle interest in contributing to the data seriously. It's not just geeks who know the markup concept now anyway, so what's the problem? If editing Wikipedia really was an entirely transparent process, it would be much more exposed to abuse than it is currently. Is it so bad to expect people to have a basic element of formal knowledge beforehand, much as a journalist has to know how to type?
(By the way, there's an enjoyable web comic about the history of typing you can read - it's also propaganda for the sensible-but-overlooked Dvorak keyboard system.)
Categories: thought
Comments
-
I agree with Calacanis perception. Wiki language is difficult to master. Sure, you can start by looking at someone elses post and start copying and pasting, but in doing so, you are actually spending more *time* which could be used, as your post goes, to express more. Suppose you copy/paste the code wrong, you have to redo it, fix it, learn more about why it's not working... it can be frustrating for some, especially beginers. The end result: many will take a look at it, close it, and move forward, without ever participating on whatever they were reading at. Just my opinion ;)
-
Thanks for your comments! Sometimes I wonder whether it's actually the established WP users who keep out beginners more than the code - the page discussions can be very aggressive sometimes. But hopefully this does at least encourage people to know what they're talking about before they get involved... (As for the code, once you've learnt it a little, it becomes a lot easier to use - just like typing!)
-
Hum. I think the exclusivity that arose from requiring knowledge of HTML probably peaked around a year or two ago. Content editing software like TinyMCE (the drop-in code that Wordpress among other packages uses for editing) is getting more user-friendly all the time, even though it's not currently perfect.
The exclusivity of ersatz markups like wiki-ish (not helped by the hundreds of different dialects that have sprung up) is a problem, but it's a stopgap measure and so quite probably a stopgap problem. You only need to follow a week or two of The Register's articles on Wikipedia to realise that they've got much deeper problems than just their markup language.
My advice in Wikipedia's case would be to just scale back the scope of the project. You've always got this overpowering quorum of computer programmers in any discussion who treat the act of creating good content with breathtakingly humourless logical pickiness. They may well know, say, the facts of a decent history essay, but until they realise that e.g. studying history isn't the same as knowing how to write a sentence about history and therefore let the few available community historians do their own thing, they should restrict Wikipedia to being an arguably invaluable tome on the hard sciences and mathematical and computational theory.
«-- back