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Is editing Wikipedia easy? Although I'll agree it's a lot easier than pushing to GitHub, it's still way beyond the skills of the average Wikipedia reader. Click Edit on any article. It's a mess of opaque syntax, presented in a textbox. Above the textbox are two different warning paragraphs, one because I'm not logged in and another warning against copyright. Any casual user who clicked Edit out of a genuine desire to improve the article would probably just click away.

I would say the ease of editing needs to be much better than GitHub or current Wikipedia. A decent, WYSIWYG editor (with a Markdown mode, don't panic) with tools to make adding citations etc. possible for mortal users.

> Click Edit on any article. It's a mess of opaque syntax, presented in a textbox.

They've had visual editing for years: https://imgur.com/a/mnePe

But that's not what's presented by default. I just tried again and got a popup asking me to switch (not sure why that didn't show up first time around), but the default button for the popup ('Start Editing') takes you to the old interface.

Also, getting the visual editor back once you say no thanks doesn't seem trivial. I had to look up how.

My guess is that regular contributors hardly use it, and its purpose is mostly symbolic rather than practical.

How I would love to see the data on how many edits submitted from the WYSIWYG tool are/aren't reverted.

Slightly less than with the text editor: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:VisualEditor%27s_ef...

I just tried in a private window, and got this: https://imgur.com/a/isTAw

I guess this just proves OP's point: Wikipedia has been struggling to introduce visual editing because the current editing userbase rejected it.

Wikipedia has had a visual editor for years. [1] But in both cases of Wikipedia and GitHub, not having to use specialized, stand-alone applications or syntax is only part of the complexity.

The two warnings are most certainly meant to discourage casual editors because of the risk of vandalism or subjective contributions. It is ambivalent to first encourage editing and then scare a number of people off afterwards.

> the ease of editing needs to be much better

I completely agree. And, as the article points out, with a heavy focus on revising the reward mechanism. And, if you ask me, with a focus on ownership. Perhaps categories of articles can be owned by groups/tags in which one can earn access and ownership. Just as when you earn enough points answering questions on StackOverflow with a certain tag, you can become a moderator for that tag.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor

> Wikipedia has had a visual editor for years.

Also, it is not the lack of a visual editor that turned Wikipedia editors away. It was the projects anal notability policies. The number of wikipedia editors peaked in 2007-2008, long before the visual editor existed.

> The drawback of GitHub is not just that pull-requests must be accepted by authorized users, but also the bureaucracy of learning version control. Compared to Wikipedia, anyone with domain knowledge can hit "Edit" and add their bit.

Editing from the site is incredibly simple.

Browse to a file, click `edit` and make your changes. Then at the bottom of the page, give a commit message and click "Propose file change".

Indeed. I've had non-technical content writers feeling comfortable adding files directly to GitHub and writing Markdown in the them. Basically using it as a CMS.

Pull Requests and Branching remained confusing issues for them though.

> Most popular alternatives to Wikipedia, commercial and non-commercial, work with ownership of articles, or a stricter editorial policy.

I'm currently doing an inclusionist fork of Wikipedia -- http://www.wikifork.org/mw/index.php/Main_Page . Wikifork (when I get it up and running) will have much looser policies on notability than Wikipedia has.

Github has an Edit button, too. It will automatically fork the repo, make a commit, and then create a pull-request. Very handy.

Why don't you just open an empty repo, and start accepting pull requests. See what happens.