Wikipedia Boss Says Site is too Complicated for Most to Edit

Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that “anyone can edit” turned 10-years-old this past weekend – Happy Birthday, Wikipedia! I can’t believe that the website has been around so long, as I just discovered it a couple of years ago (like most people, I’m sure), but in the little time I’ve been using it, it’s become a go-to site for a lot of information. At this point, I certainly wouldn’t want to go without it.

The problem I’ve long had for Wikipedia, though, is that it might be called a site that “anyone can edit”, but I have some qualms about that. I’m technically savvy, and can handle most forms of code, whether it be source code or HTML. But when it came to editing an article in Wikipedia, I was left dumb-founded… I had no idea what I was doing, and I sure didn’t want to read through pages and pages of documentation to figure it out.

In some ways, I’m alone in this. My brother, for example, who isn’t affluent in HTML, figured out how to edit Wikipedia like a pro after just a month or so of discovering the site. That of course made me feel like an idiot, but at the same time, I do feel that it’s far too complicated to edit. The support the site has now from contributors is enormous, so I can’t help but imagine how great the support could be if everyone truly could edit it.

I’m not alone in this thinking, it seems, as the Wikipedia boss, Jimmy Wales, said the same thing. He mentions in an interview with BBC News that the site needs to “ramp up for new users”, but at the same time, the company has no interest in changing anything for its power users – those who’ve been editing Wikipedia for some time and wouldn’t care for the change.

When code is being dealt with, a bit of complication simply can’t be avoided, but there has to be ways to make things a bit easier for the layman. Not everyone is a techy, so hopefully an easier-to-edit Wikipedia is not too far off.

He said a lot of people were “afraid” to contribute to the site by the sometimes complicated code – known as Wiki mark-up – needed to format entries. “If you click edit and you see some Wiki syntax and some bizarre table structure – a lot of people are literally afraid. “They’re good people and they don’t want to break something.