[Wikipedia-l] Questionmark Links Considered Harmful

[Erik Moeller]

One design aspect that has always bothered me about Wikipedia and Usemod is
the questionmark used to denote page creation:

              page that does not exist?

This is bad design for several reasons:

- It is non-obvious. A questionmark is associated with help and many sites
in fact use such notation to explain terms.
- It is easy to overlook. People not familiar with the way Wikipedia works
will probably tend to ignore it the first times they see it.
- It is ambigious. Since Wikipedia links are not underlined, it is not clear
whether the questionmark refers to the whole term or only part of it.

It's also annoying in print, but Wikipedia fortunately already hides it when
printing pages.

I encourage you to take a look at the design I have chosen for the
infoAnarchy wiki:

http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/

Here non-existent pages are linked to with red links on gray background.
This is non-ambigious, visible and intuitive, as I notice that many people
experiment with these links. 

Now, there's of course a reason questionmarks were chosen for the original
design: accessibility. Questionmarks can be interpreted by text-to-speech
readers  so that blind and disabled users can interpret these links. Fortunately,
the W3C has done a lot of accessibility work and this scheme is now no
longer required. This page:

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS-access

describes the features added to cascading style sheets specifically for
text-to-speech browsers. My suggestion would be a short beep before and after the
create-links (cue-before and cue-after properties). Note that these CSS
propreties are interpreted by many modern speech browsers:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/Browsing

This would be an easy way to improve usability for average users while not
sacrificing accessibility.

Regards,

Erik

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