Wikipedia will never cease to amaze me. Its instructions include such gems as:
Or best of all:
How can you possibly take an encyclopedia seriously when it has editorial policies such as those?
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Posted at 23:58 in wikipedia Anyone who has ever tried to edit Wikipedia will have encountered wikitext, the rather esoteric syntax used for markup on its pages.
Wikitext is, in theory at least, simpler than HTML. Two single quotes delimit ''italics'', while three single quotes indicate '''bold text'''. [Square brackets] indicate external links, [[double square brackets]] indicate internal links, and so on. A lot of other wiki software uses similar syntax. For example, Trac, a popular open source bug tracking system, uses a very similar markup language, and since you can also embed HTML in it, and even use a fairly sophisticated macro language, it allows very fine-grained control of the contents of the page. For the novice, there is a helpful toolbar at the top of the edit box, so that you can easily mark up various parts of the text as bold, italics, hyperlinks, and so on.
However, in late 2007, it somehow feels wrong. As wrong as it felt not being able to get broadband in late 2005.
Perhaps there is a place for wikitext, as a fallback to improve accessibility when JavaScript is not available. And some things are simply not possible (yet) without it, such as typesetting mathematical equations. However, in terms of usability, it sucks. Apart from having to navigate away from the main article page, you have to scroll through the box to find the part of the wikitext corresponding to where you want to make the change (not obvious in an article with a lot of footnotes, references, tables and the like). It also creates a distinct range of systemic biases, which is a problem that Wikipedia itself acknowledges. How much nicer it would be, if clicking on “edit” on a section of a wiki page were to bring up an in-line rich text editor where what you see is what you get.
Web browsers have now had rich text editing capabilities for over seven years. This feature was first introduced in July 2000 in Internet Explorer 5.5, and nowadays every major browser supports it one way or another. It needs a lot of fiddling about with JavaScript in order to work properly on all of them, of course, but there are several popular and mature libraries and components such as FreeTextBox, TinyMCE and FCKeditor that handle this very well, so that’s pretty much a solved problem. Even cleaning Word HTML and producing valid XHTML — once common objections to rich text editors — are solved problems too.
There are many rich Internet applications these days that raise the bar significantly in terms of quality of user experience. Slick, good looking, easy to use sites are becoming more and more commonplace, and while ones such as Google Maps or EyeOS still have a bit of a “wow” factor, it’s getting easier all the time to develop them. With libraries like jQuery, for instance, you can implement a Google Suggest-style Ajax search facility in a couple of hours.
With it becoming increasingly easy to create elegant rich Internet applications, and the tools to do so being readily available, free and open source, having such an awkward and clunky way of editing content is beginning to look very last millennium. It’s time it went the way of the dinosaurs.
It’s now about two months since I decided to quit editing Wikipedia, and I think it’s been the best decision I’ve made so far this year. Wikipedia can be pretty distracting if you take it too seriously, and in fact the best advice I can give to anyone thinking of becoming a regular Wikipedian is: don’t.
I’ve decided that I’m not going to make any anonymous edits either. When I see stuff on Wikipedia that is blatantly biased, untrue and even downright stupid, it takes a lot of restraint to avoid clicking the "Edit" button, but I’ve decided that the best thing to do is just resign myself to the fact that Wikipedia is a soapbox, it is a social networking site, it is an indiscriminate collection of information, and it is pretty much everything else that it claims it isn’t, and trying to keep it right is like painting the Forth Bridge.
For a while I’ve been wondering on and off whether I could just dispense with Wikipedia altogether. As an experiment, I’ve added an entry for en.wikipedia.org to my hosts file on my work computer to block it off completely. It gets a little bit frustrating when I come across a link on someone’s blog to a Wikipedia entry on something I don’t properly understand, but hey, there’s always Google to help me seek out more reliable sources. It’ll be interesting to see how long I can go without it, but I rather suspect that before too long I won’t even notice it.
Posted at 17:59 in wikipedia Regular readers of my blog will no doubt be aware that over the past eighteen months or so I have been fairly active on Wikipedia, notching up just under a thousand edits or so. 
This may sound like a lot but it is not uncommon to find Wikipedians with edit counts reaching well into the tens of thousands, so I am not the most active by a long shot.
However, I have decided that it is time to call it a day.
The main reason is to help me stay focused. Editing Wikipedia and participating in all the discussions etc can be fun, but it can also be pretty distracting if you are not careful. It is also all too easy to get lost in all the masses and masses of trivia that are to be found there: if you have ever gone on to it looking for information about cryptographic hash algorithms and ended up with a dozen articles open at pages such as Jennifer Aniston, Self Diagnosis and Eta Carinae after five hours of fascinated clicking, having totally forgotten what you went on to Wikipedia for in the first place, you will know exactly what I mean.
“Computer Joe” Anderson wrote a blog entry recently in which he attempted to debunk some “myths” about Wikipedia (or “the Wikipedia” as he calls it). It’s gives an interesting insight into Wikipedian culture that most casual readers have no idea about, such as the recent changes patrol and the Arbitration Committee. However, while his arguments are all factually accurate, I must disagree with his conclusions. Despite all its processes, policies, procedures and patrollers, Wikipedia still has very much the feel of being the Wild West of encyclopedia territory: chaotic, anarchic and at times pretty bewildering.
I must admit to finding it curious that Wikipedia policy states in no uncertain terms that “Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information.” After all, as far as indiscriminate collections of information go, Wikipedia has few rivals. After all, when you encounter articles like Globus Cassus — an obscure book that you’ve almost certainly never heard of, which outlines a completely whacked out and bizarre proposal to dismantle the earth and use it to build a flying saucer the size of Saturn — and then discover that it survived not just one but two deletion debates, you just have to shake your head and say to yourself, “Only on Wikipedia”. But it turns out that it featured at one of those highfalutin modern art exhibitions where you expect to see cows in formaldehyde, piles of bricks, and avant garde paintings by elephants and chimpanzees. Apparently that makes it Notable. Go figure.
Posted at 19:46 in wikipedia I have just spent the whole morning battling with a bug in an RTF encoding class in one of our applications. For some reason, Unicode characters were causing Microsoft Word to either consider that the file was corrupted or else to drop characters seemingly at random.
It turned out that the reason for the bug was that I was using some incorrect information on Wikipedia. Now I must confess to being a bit of a Wikipedia fan, but it turns out that this particular article omitted some important information, as I discovered on a closer reading of the MSDN documentation.
Since anyone can edit Wikipedia, I have corrected it, but it just goes to show that if you rely too much on the information that you get there, you can run into trouble.
Posted at 13:38 in wikipedia
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