Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Interactive Prototype/What about all the nice things Wikitext offers us? Will they be available in Flow?/reply (45)

Wow, wait a second. What's going on here? I believed in you, guys. You always told us you want to analyze the existing workflows and provide an alternative interface for these workflows without breaking them. Using wikitext on talk pages is an essential feature. Removing this feature is out of the question. This would make the whole Flow project pointless.

Articles are edited in wikitext and always will be edited in wikitext no matter if the wikitext is edited in a WYSIWYG editor or at the source level. Experienced users (the goddam stakeholders in our valuable and beloved Wikimedia landscape) will always use wikitext. Always. They did this for over 10 years and will continue to do this for another 10 years for the same reason LaTeX is still used by experienced users since 30 years. It's not that these LaTeX users are grumpy old people and the only reason they are still editing at the source level is that they are to lazy to learn something new. Young people still learn and love LaTeX today. Same with wikitext. If articles are edited in wikitext it does not make any sense to ban wikitext from talk pages. Not even from user talk pages. We want to talk about the articles we write. We want to show examples of different formating options. We want to talk about different implementations of a template on our user talk pages. We need the same syntax we are using in the articles.

I really don't see a reason why it should not be possible to simply rely on wikitext in discussions like LiquidThreads does right now. Discussions don't use much formatting anyway. Unexperienced users don't need to care about any syntax details. They write a sentence and press "save". They don't need any WYSIWYG. This will only lead them to make their posts super-fancy with colors and all other formatting options they find. This is not helpful. We need talk pages to talk about articles. That's all.

Sure, wikitext is not nice and it's definitely a good idea to make it better (e.g. get rid of the single vs. double brackets confusion, ban deprecated HTML feature like the &lt;font> and everlasting &lt;center> crap). It's not that we need the current implementation of wikitext. It's a language. Languages can be translated. But we need source level editing for both articles and most talk pages. Please don't ruin the wonderful Flow project by banning wikitext. One thing is for sure: If you do this the big communities (especially the German community) will ban Flow. I don't want this to happen. I want a better software for talk pages. But it can't be all WYSIWYG. It must be a well balanced mixture.