Seeing things

By L.M.

WIKIPEDIA has just unveiled the first version of its new visual editor. Babbage saw a preview of the new interface (now available here) before it went live and it would be no overstatement to call it the most significant change in Wikipedia's short history. The hope is that editing the online encyclopedia with the visual editor will be more like playing around on blogging platforms such as Wordpress or Blogger and less like something that only other people do.

For the moment the visual editor is still a developer prototype, or a demo of a demo, intended only for software developers to fiddle with and help improve. The options are limited to using pre-formatted lists and inserting bold, italics and links. There's also a dropdown menu with a list of formats (see picture), which obviates the need to mark up headers and boxes. Advanced users also have the option to see how their changes look in wiki syntax, HTML or JSON, a kind of Javascript-lite. Picture-related tools and the like will be included in later versions as the new editor is steadily improved before integration into Wikipedia starts in June 2012. Wikipedia reckons it is the most challenging technical project they have ever undertaken.

The new editor is needed for a simple reason: the number of active editors on Wikipedia's English-language version is in decline, having peaked in 2007. According to the 2011-12 annual plan of the Wikimedia Foundation, the organisation that runs Wikipedia, “declining participation is by far the most serious problem facing the Wikimedia projects”. Visual editor is a “big obvious fix”, part of a $1m project to develop new features and make improvements. It is a change that was long overdue.

A fortnight before Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger officially launched Wikipedia on January 15th 2001, neither one had ever heard of a wiki. When Mr Sanger was introduced to the idea, he was impressed by its simplicity, writing that it was “the ULTIMATE ‘open' and simple format for developing content” (his emphasis). At the time, wikis seemed revolutionary. Here was a way for amateurs to avoid mucking about with complicated code such as HTML in favour of a relatively easy mark-up language with only the most basic of stylistic and structural conventions.

That was, of course, before your grandmother joined Facebook. Ten years later the online population has grown to include most sentient beings (at least in the developed world) and web users have grown accustomed to graphical interfaces. The wiki language now seems impenetrable to most—or at least too much trouble to learn. “When Wikipedia was created, everything was hard on the internet. We were no harder than anything else. But today most forms of interaction online are easier than editing a wiki article and that creates a barrier to entry that doesn't do anybody any good,” says Sue Gardner, executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation.

If HTML is a vast open field on which you can wander in any direction unfettered by restrictions, then Facebook is a city tram line, structured and restrictive of where those using it can go. Wikis fall somewhere in the middle, allowing a great deal of freedom within certain limits. Think of it as a network of pathways and cycle lanes where your route is based on the specific needs of your journey. The wiki syntax assumed people were familiar with the lay of the land. Visual editor is akin to handing out maps at the entrance.

The Foundation hopes this will lead to a fresh spurt of new editors, upon whom “the success of the projects is entirely dependent”. This is both good and bad. The last great influx, in 2006-07, was badly handled by existing editors who couldn't deal with the sudden influx. Unable to coach or orient what Ms Gardner calls the “well-intentioned but clueless” new editors, they erected barriers in the form of templates and automated responses.

This time around, the Foundation will do things differently. As with editing articles, editors no longer need to know arcane codes in order to dispense “wikilove”—virtual medals congratulating contributors on a job well done. Instead, another new tool makes it easier to award stars and badges as a means of encouraging new recruits. It is hard to say whether that will be enough. But if things go well, Wikipedia's famously grumpy senior editors should have their hands full once again.