Does anyone else think the complexity of the markup is an explanation declining editorship?
One of the problems with the complexity is that there has never been a good funneling system to the pages that provide clear instructions. If every new editor for the last five years had been funneled directly to the Wikipedia:Tutorial when they first decided to edit, in a way that actually made them try it before opting out and then given a link to the Wikipedia:cheatsheet, and then when they wanted to create their first article, were directed first to the Wikipedia:Article wizard before starting, again in a way that made them start there before opting out, many problems would have been avoided.--Fuhghettaboutit 18:49, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
I agree that a good WYSIWYG editor ought to be a top Foundation priority, and improving user friendliness of the help system a top priority of Wikipedians. For instance, just today I came across a talk page (of Wikipedia:Uploading Images) where people were clearly ending up needing help and not knowing how to get somewhere like the helpdesk, so I added a note.
In addition, Fuhghettaboutit's point about funnelling brings up the current RFC on autoconfirmed status in order to create articles. This might superficially sound "anti-openness", but as a draft of how it might look in practice shows (here), it's really not, it's just directing users to choose from several assistance options for article creation when their account is brand new. This should ensure a better experience for newcomers.
While I disagree on the auto-confirmed idea incredibly strongly ( we just do not have any way to do it cleanly and without making it into either a hoop jump that will lose a lot of people or a useless exercise that will lose good people and keep bad) there are a lot of things that could be improved that will help both new and experienced users alike (and I think help with deletion backlogs etc).
The WYSIWYG piece is obviously important and like I said above a very high priority for the foundation right now, including Mediawiki 2.0 which includes redoing the parser to allow for much more. The other thing that you bring up for the help system is, I think, key. This includes all of the pieces from on wiki documentation, to peer to peer mentoring system to offline help like IRC or OTRS. For example if you start sorting through the Help TOC's on English Wikipedia they are a total mess leading every which way and frustrate me I can't imagine how they frustrate new users. Sadly things like the the article wizard and AfC also need to have total reworks before they could even think of taking large loads on without major issues but if they get those renovations could be helpful regardless. Have you seen the Commons image uploading cartoon? Something like that which was adjustable for project specific rules would be great for the image uploading page you were talking about.
"we just do not have any way to do it cleanly" - well as you can gather from my proposal [1] here, I think it can be done perfectly cleanly, and need not feel like a hoop to newcomers at all (see here), but rather a choice of help options.
Wizard/AFC could do with a lot of improvement, yes; like bringing in Javascript or linking to examples in a systematic way. But even without that, I think it's better than allowing newcomers a blank canvas and no clue what to do, getting it inevitably wrong, and then leaving in frustration. (But let's not make this thread about that - the RFC and talk page are quite enough...) Rd232 04:09, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
Why not have a link to the new article wizard in the sidebar? There are already links for creating books and uploading files, why not have one for creating an article? It would say something like "create new article" or "start an article" and link to the article wizard.