I had a conversation last night about Wikipedia. I was explaining that one needed to know some basics of HTML in order to edit a Wikipedia page. This led into a fruitful conversation about the digital divide. If one needed to know HTML to edit a page, then that weeds out only a select group of people.
After second-guessing myself, I went on Wikipedia this morning to edit a page. Sure enough, there were those trusty HTML codes (they never escape me). However, I didn’t actually have to code in order to edit a sentence within the text. So, that part was pretty easy. Still, the page code was peppered with HTML tags- one simply had to figure out where they are able to type as to not alter the code. As long as a novice is not intimidated by the code, then editing a page should be accessible.
However, if one wanted to create a completely new page, life gets a little more difficult. I entered a term into Wikipedia that I didn’t think it would have. Sure enough, there was not a page on this topic. I searched the page for a while to figure out how to add a page. I couldn’t find anything on adding pages, so I resorted to the help page. Once that was navigated, I was finally able to create my entry. Actually writing a new page was surprisingly easy. I didn’t need to know the code like I thought I would. Creating a page- once I found out how to do it- was more or less badda-bing-badda-boom.
My final thoughts on editing and creating entries in Wikipedia is this- the HTML codes definitely look intimidating to someone who is not familiar with them, even if you don’t actually need to use them. I remember going to a page to edit (before I took the HTML class at St. Kates) and giving up because I was confused. My suggestion would be that the “people” at Wikipedia make the editing pages more user-friendly. WordPress does a good job of hiding HTML code, and still allowing you to use it with the separate tab (bravo).
That’s all for now! -Lindsey
We’re working on it! Though there probably won’t be a good what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor for Wikipedia – and similar sites running the MediaWiki software – for a while. As in over a year, at least.
(This is because of bad decisions earlier in the history of the software, which are proving hair-tearingly hard to get around without changing the current markup code, which has to stay because there’s so much content in that form already. Argh …)
But yes, we’re *painfully* aware of it being less-than-adequate.
I “heard” on MPR that the number of people that create new pages is actually very small, and usually the same people. On the other hand, the nubmer of people that edit said pages is larger.