Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-3417079-20150626034226/@comment-303594-20150714090408

> And designers have an opportunity--really, a responsbility--to design systems that fascilitate that.

I disagree. Some designers have a responsiblity for some systems to be designed like that.

A CLI, for example - doesn't need a visual interface. If people haven't been trained to use a CLI, they will get stuck - they will have to use the documentation to get them going. When they are trained in the system - they will be able to perform tasks much faster than using the visual interface.

That visual interface (for example, windows explorer) exists - but it contains a subset of the functionality the CLI can use. It's still useful, but it isn't as efficient.

> The very best example I can give of why things should generally be as simple and easy as possible is this quote from Steve Job's biography

I think we have a conflict of terms here. When I think of something booting fast, I'm thinking of a lightweight interface that gets things done. I'm thinking Monobook over Oasis, Bash over Windows Explorer, foobar2000 over iTunes. When you make something fast, you have tradeoffs, so I don't think that's a good analogy to use.

> you could also make a case for saying word processors should not have visual editors and that visual editors are somewhat unneccessary.

Here's where we get into the meat of your argument, if you want - disregard the previous two topics if you like - I found it hard to respond to the post without covering them.

The visual editor interface is an interface to wikicode - wikicode came first, and Wikia spent significant resources tuning VisualEditor into what it is today (which, as far as I'm aware having not used it is a functional and fairly good interface for editing wikis.) It doesn't do everything simply because some things are very hard to express visually - for example template building, which I believe can't be done properly in VE (again, sorry - all of these are assumptions having not used the program).

What you're arguing is that MediaWiki pages are annotated in such a way that the documentation is obvious to anyone who edits them. I.E. When you preview it gives an annotation, or mouseover the paramater when editing, or the $1 automatically changes to "username". All of these are good ideas, and I believe that if Wikia had infinite resources, they would do this. However - they don't. System messages are:
 * Not edited often
 * Not edited by most users (normally admins, who tend to be more technical than the typical end-user)

and so I don't believe that annotating these messages (especially because this is something that can quickly be figured out by documentation) is too much of a high priority. Most users find out about these messages from the documentation, and so that's the perfect place to tell users how to edit them.