Hello,
It was nice to meet you all, this hackathon was really a great event
for me, enriching, passioning and enjoyable. I hope that it was also the
case for all others.
So, in one of the design workshop, we worked on the "Knowledge
requirement", that is some time articles treat non-obvious subjects and
go with assumptions on user knowledge. That can lead the user to a
frustrating situation where she think that she will never be able to
understand the topic. As far as I know, the writing guideline is that
every article should be suffisant, so probably that kind of article
would need to be improved. On the other hand, some community member
aren't find with the idea to "expand the whole subject from the ground"
in every article, and the most knowledgeable on a topic are not
necessarily those with the best pedagogic skills.
So our concern here is to bring a solution to user who want to know,
but don't necessarily have the basic knowledge expected to understand
it. The "let's make the article perfect for everyone" being out of
reach, the proposal to avoid user frustration is to inform him that the
article have knowledge requirements that she can acquire with some
pedagogical materials (preferably on wikversity/wikibook/wikisource).
I already had a mokcup of a possible solution I thought by myself, but
within this workshop, we were able to come with something probably far
more relevant : simpler, less invading, while at least as much
informative. The idea is to use a something similar to
Template:Disambiguation, and to list all the "dependencies" in a section
at the bottom of the article or in a subpage.
Moreover I think that this template may rise a warning message when
this sections/subpages doesn't exist, like with the ref and references
markup, so that if one place the template in an article, if would be
inclined to create the corresponding sections/subpages.
Now what is needed is to design/pick the text (which should short of
course) and the picture/icon to illustrate it. I already made some
research on commons to find a releavant icon, but maybe someone could
come with a better proposition, or even an original icon which fit the
topic. You can find a preliminary report on[1], but it's in french. I
will translate it later this week on meta, but this mail tell most of
what is written there, and I guess you don't need to know french to tell
your opinion on icons I selected from Commons as candidate for this
template.
[1]
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilisateur:Psychoslave/pr%C3%A9requis
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