MediaWiki appropiation

We have a number of undergrad students helping us out on our project, and it seemed that whilst there was a lot of knowledge about wikis, and they were generally quite clued up about the advantages of collaborative ways of working, comparatively few of them had actual practical experience editing any kind of wiki. There are obviously a lot of factors that play into this, one of which may be general teen apathy, but I think another factor is that the lack of WYSIWYG editing - this means that even for relatively techie people, at least a little effort needs to be invested in thinking about how editing works before going ahead. I wonder if this is a factor in the gender split, that girls (particularly young ones!) are more likely to be put off very early on because the markup language looks like code? We do some outreach work with school children and one of the biggest challenges is fighting the assumption that Computing and IT are a) boring and b) impossibly difficult. So many kids write off the discipline, and of those that don't the gender split is pretty depressing.