>If you want truly open communication, go to 4chan.

Its not about open communications, its the fact that information has to fit the criteria Wikipedia deems necessary, and that does not fit a lot of information out there. For example, a group of proffessionals in building design want to create an educational site on how to get started digitally, what software, the theories and factors in play when creating a building, fueled by their real-life experience and education over time. That is not something you can put on Wikipedia. You can put some of the theory, but ultimately experience is lost in translation or deleted due to no sources.

>Claiming that WP isn't open because they want a basic level of quality is just grinding an axe

Its not open in anywhere near what their vision states. Its open for sourced information and whatever various mods will allow. Which, is fine if thats how they want it to be, but to claim its an open platform for information is false.

>WP has informed a far greater number of humans to a far higher level of quality than all the ^chans put together.

I am not advocating that Wikipedia just be an open book to write whatever you want, but that its platform does not support much outside of sourced info, which is a category of information, not the sum of all information, and leaves out a lot of other information that doesn't fit its guidelines.

>Yes, learning the full markup isn't trivial, but the basic stuff is. And I'm not sure how it's "not open" simply because it has a learning curve.

Making a wiki has very little to do with the basic markup, and a lot more to do with designing templates and organizing how your data is formatted and presented, and that is what mediawiki fails to do in a manner that is accessible. Difficulty does reduce accessibility, which infact does reduce its openness. If it were simpler and well documented, searchable, then there would be a lot more writers. A lot of the problems can be solved by having a markup language that also acts like a programming language, being able to work with variables and inputs and do transforms on them, much like an actual templating language.

The learning curve of Libreoffice or other programs of that nature is a false equivalence. Adding a graph in Libreoffice takes a few clicks of the dropdowns, maybe a few tries of adding in info. Adding in a graph into mediawiki requires you to find an extension, install that, learn its syntax, and god forbid you add it into a template dynamically, learn how to get data variables from wiki markup. It is significantly more work and understanding of tech.

>Complex software has a learning curve, and hiding that learning curve is really difficult.

Yes, it is, but it is possible, if the software were designed for being used outside of the wikipedia environment more, similiar to frameworks like Drupal 8 or Wordpress are, it would be much more maintainable and learnable. Understand that wikitext is just a small small part of a mediawiki environment, and even thats enough to bar entry for many people.

>It's a heavyweight engine that you're wanting to put lots of heavyweight stuff on. That's what they're designing for, and it has some warts, but it works.

Its an old engine that is very integrated into itself with a lot of tech debt that hasn't been paid back. They are designing for that, not for creating a framework that best suits accessible, editable, presentable information.

>It's daft to complain that the engine primarily written by a non-profit for one of the top 5 websites isn't written as a one-click install feather-light application.
Wikimedia does not claim the Mediawiki is made for WP and shouldn't be used outside of it. I claim that, but thats not how it should be.

An application being 'heavy' has nothing to do with its maintainability or usability to the end user. Arguably, Wordpress is much heavier, yet has a built-in auto updater, plugins and theme installer, and is quite easy to setup.

>Basically you're holding WP to an impossible standard and complaining that they don't measure up.

I'm holding /Wikimedia/ to the standard they've set for themselves, with expectations much lower than that, and still it doesn't hold up, because they are not actually doing what their vision is, they're just making their own product where information has to fit their guidelines. You can argue that Wikimedia is a non-profit, or the software is complex, or whatever you'd like, but the reality is that there is a significant amount of information that will never be passed into the internet space because good platforms for it don't exist yet.