Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Interactive Prototype/What about all the nice things Wikitext offers us? Will they be available in Flow?/reply (31)

Forcing all users to use Wikitext is a bad idea, I don't think nobody is denying that. But forcing all users away from Wikitext is an equally bad idea, and this is said by someone who love visual editing and user-friendly workflows. The fact that you don't seem to realize the reasons of why such is the case is utterly worrisome, given that you seem to be in charge of the design. That you actively want to get rid of wikitext is decidedly alarming.

There are features in plain text editing and formatting that simply have no match in the state-of-the-art approach to visual editing. Copy-paste workflows, re-arranging, quick access to parameters from memory by expert users, touch-typing... those are severely hurt or right away impossible in full-featured visual editors, let alone new developments with entry-level features.

A decision to remove wikimarkup completely would break the workflows of millions of expert editors, which are the majority of your current users, and certainly the more vocal ones. The huge resistance to change that the VE and Flow are facing are because so far any of you have failed to even recognize that this might be a problem. Please say that you have some concern for we the veterans, and that experienced editors are not going to be thrown to the wolves with the vague hope that new editors will come in masses to fix the project thanks to the usability improvements alone.