User:Adwiii/Wikicode

From the beginning of time people have shared knowledge. People share knowledge in many ways everyday by means such as speaking, writing, reading and many other ways. When Wikipedia was first created it was designed to help the world do just that, share knowledge. “Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” said Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia (Lih XV). On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was founded and since then has been a source of knowledge for people across the globe. Wikipedia is now available in 269 languages with English being the most prominent containing over 3.5 million articles. Yet Wikipedia is not written by some large company or publisher; Wikipedia is written by everyday people like you and me (“Wikipedia.”) There are currently 154,405 actively registered editors who contribute to Wikipedia regularly (“Statistics.”), not to mention the thousands of unregistered users. Wikipedia is run by this massive group of volunteers who have collectively written a very extensive encyclopedia. Yet the fact that the encyclopedia is run by so many people and has so many articles does not mean that it is easy to edit. Each and every page has an edit button at the top that lets users change the contents of the page, but they must learn Wiki markup, or the computer code that runs, Wikipedia in order to edit and contribute. Since its beginnings Wikipedia has become far too complex to the point where the original statement, “that anyone can edit (“Main Page.”)” is now untrue, compromising the overall quality of the encyclopedia. Every page on Wikipedia is run by Wiki markup, the computer coding language. Wiki markup was originally designed to be simple and allowed inexperienced users to start editing without much training. The small things that are used most often are fairly simple; to bold text you put three apostrophes around it, to make it italics you add two, and to make it both bold and italics you add five apostrophes. Also things like links to other Wikipedia articles are easy to add; all you do is add two brackets, i.e. Page name (Lih 90, Woods, “Wikitext cheat sheet”, “Help:Wiki markup.”, “Textformattingrules”, “Wikitext”) There are some things that are fairly simple to do but at the same time other things are much more complex. Once you clear the realm of simple things Wiki markup either adopts the HTML code equivalent or has its own equally complex version. Things like tables that can be found in hundreds of Wikipedia articles are fairly complex; to make a simple two by two matrix it would take 10 rows of coding (Woods, “Help:Wiki markup.”). Also Wikipedia is very strict about making sure that all of the information found in an article is properly referenced and can be cross checked if needed, but even inserting these references can be hard for some. To properly cite a book it takes 11 different elements of coding. An example reference for Andrew Lih’s The Wikipedia Revolution: how a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia would look like the following: “ ” (“User:Adwiii.”). To some this is a lot to go through to put the little bit of information that they found into the encyclopedia. Yet this is not the hardest thing about Wiki markup. In Wikipedia there are also many things that one can do to a page; there are hundreds of templates that are used to add certain things to a page. Templates are used all the time throughout Wikipedia; they are generally used to add something to the page that would be very tedious to add manually, most commonly a message posted in an article saying that the article needs help (“Help:Template.”). There are templates for all sorts of things, from needing more references to needing to be rewritten entirely. While most onetime editors would not need to know these things, any editor who stays with Wikipedia for very long learns that one must know template upon template for editing Wikipedia to be very practical. Most of these templates were designed so the editor will not have to write out the entire message; however, the editor still must know all of the templates. There are over 400 clean up templates alone, so it becomes very hard for an editor to even know enough to become vaguely efficient in that area (“Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup.”). Many people will still try to contribute without the use of this more advanced coding but without the use of the code in their work, it is much less likely to be accepted by the overall Wikipedia community. One example of this is what happened to the article about PXIT, a technology company (“PXIT.”). The article was deleted and in its reasoning the administrator that deleted the page put, “Please learn Wiki markup- you cannot be bothered to create a link […] so why should I look at it. (“User talk:RHaworth.”) After this the page was removed, and the editor, trying to helpfully contribute, could not do so. On Wikipedia, when an article is being considered for deletion, it goes to a deletion notice board. The average number of articles put up for deletion throughout a twenty day period was 79 with the highest for one day being 110 (“Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/April 1-20.”) With this many new articles being put up for deletion, many of the new editors who come in and try to help feel like they are not wanted or cannot contribute and leave the project for good. There are thousands of people that are on Wikipedia every day. There are 154,405 Active Registered Users on Wikipedia, active meaning that they have contributed in the past 30 days. This may sound like a lot but it is really not when compared to other statistics. There are over 14,282,000 registered users, but only 154,405 of those have edited recently. This means that only 7.5 percent of editors stay after their first few contributions. This means that, out of every 1,000 people that join, only 75 will remain on Wikipedia for any extended amount of time (“Statistics.”) To go along with the extreme use of templates, there are also templates that are often placed on pages created by these newcomers. The “Wikify” template notifies readers and editors that the article being viewed may need to be “wikified,” or have extra Wiki markup added to it to meet Wikipedia’s quality standards (“Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup.”). This can be very discouraging to new users as some can take it as an attack on the article they have made and as seen above it could also lead to the deletion of the article entirely. Although the complexity of the Wiki markup is widely a problem for those attempting to edit Wikipedia, there are currently a few measures being taken to help out new editors. There is the “Help me” template that can be added to a users talk page that will then notify other more experienced editors using internet relay chat, or IRC, that they need help (“Template:Help me”, “Wikipedia:IRC.”). An IRC allows people to connect and join discussions on different topics. IRC is widely used because it allows for the collaboration of more than two people (“What is IRC.”). While this system helps when it works, there are some major flaws in this system. For a new editor to be able to use this template, the editor first must know that the template exists. Along with knowing that it exists the user must also know how to use it. It is likely that the user would not understand how to use the template. If an editor new to Wikipedia needs help and has no one to ask for help, they are highly likely to leave feeling very discouraged. Although IRC is partially working for now, there are some better options that would make the Wiki markup itself more user friendly. A “what you see is what you get,” or WYSIWYG, system could be imposed on Wikipedia giving users a more user friendly interface and something they already know how to use. WYSIWYG systems, such as Microsoft Word and other Microsoft products, do the same thing without the code. With a WYSIWYG system what is put into the editing window appears exactly as it would in the final output making it ideal for people who do not know or want to learn Wiki markup. This is very similar to other things people already use every day, e.g. in Microsoft Word, when you want to bold text all you have to do is press the bold button and the text becomes bold instead of having to put coding around it. This would solve the problem of new editors having to learn the markup and would allow them to contribute more effectively and more efficiently to Wikipedia (“WYSIWYG.”). Currently Wikipedia is run by a very complex system of coding that is very hard to learn and very un-user friendly. Currently hundreds of users are driven away because of how un-user friendly it is. Wikipedia is trying to be a “collective sum of all human knowledge” and that is being impeded by the excessively difficult code being used to run it. There are multiple ways that this could be fixed, whether through the current system of help templates or through a possible WYSIWYG system that would make it more user friendly and easier to use.

Works Cited Lih, Andrew and Jimmy Wales. The Wikipedia Revolution: how a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia. New York: Hyperion Books, March 17, 2009. Print. Woods, Dan and Peter Thoeng. Wikis FOR DUMMIES. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Publishing, Inc., 2007. Print. “Wikitext.” Wikispaces. Tangient LLC, 2011. Web. 2 Apr 2011. “TextFormattingRules.” UseMod Wiki, 31 Mar 2011. Web. 2 Apr 2011. “Wikitext cheat sheet.” Wincent. Wincent, 2011. Web. 2 Apr 2011. “Statistics” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Apr 2011. Web. 2 Apr 2011. “User talk:RHaworth.” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Apr 2011. Web. 2 Apr 2011. “Wikipedia.” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 15 Jan 2001. Web. 21 Apr 2011. “Template:Help me.” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Apr 2011. Web. 20 Apr 2011. “What is IRC?.” Webopedia. Foster City, CA: QuinStreet Inc., 2011. Web. 20 Apr 2011. “Wikipedia:IRC.” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Jan 2011. Web. 20 Apr 2011. “Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Log/April 1-20.” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Jan 2011. Web. 20 Apr 2011. “Main Page.” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 9 Mar 2011. Web. 21 Apr 2011. “Help:Wiki markup.” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 19 Apr 2011. Web. 21 Apr 2011. “User:Adwiii.” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 21 Apr 2011. Web. 21 Apr 2011. “Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup.” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Mar 2011. Web. 21 Apr 2011. “Help:Template.” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 14 Apr 2011. Web. 21 Apr 2011. “PXIT” Wikipedia. San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 20 Feb 2011. Web. 21 Apr 2011. “WYSIWYG” San Francisco, CA: Wikimedia Foundation, 17 Apr 2011. Web. 21 Apr 2011.