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Australopithecus afarensis

So easy a caveman could do it

The rich text editor (RTE) also known as WYSIWYG editor, had a serious problem with sophisticated Familypedia articles. For example, William I, King of England (1027-1087) formerly loaded into the editor in 1.5 minutes. Some modifications have been made to correct this so that the same article now loads in about 5 seconds. The huge delays using the new editor ought to be a thing of the past. If this is not the case, please let me know what articles have long load times. The downside of this technique is that for those that use preview in the old editor, you will not see the rendered infoboxes and so on until after the article is saved. I think most will view this is small inconvenience- wikitext is a huge barrier to many of our contributors because it is common for folks to take an interest in family history somewhat later in life and for these people, it is common to feel uncomfortable with obscure formats like wikitext.

I know most of the regular contributors here are highly comfortable with wikitext, but really we ought to be aiming for a time where most of the regular editors know nothing about wikitext and always use RTE and forms.


To this end, I have taken the habit of leaving RTE on so that I can examine how our typical contributors will be viewing the article. The more of us that do this periodically and report problems, the faster we can get to that state where even a caveman can work on Familypedia. (Including genealogists reluctant to give up working on paper). ~ Phlox 16:44, 7 July 2009 (UTC)