Does anyone else think the complexity of the markup is an explanation declining editorship?

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)