On 3/23/11 2:56 PM, Chitu Okoli wrote: Oh, I definitely agree that grad student contributions are tremendously valuable! (especially having been on until very recently) My point was this: that writing for a lay audience and writing for fellow researchers (grad students included) are different tasks, and mixing them leads to reduced value for each audience. I am fine with each paper having a "for laypeople" and "for researchers" section to the summary. My concern is less with aesthetics than what the interface looks like it does (the "apparent affordances" to use some jargon). As an analogy, I'm sure many of you have encountered Java and Flash applications which have all the same GUI widgets (buttons, scroll bars, etc.) as native OS apps, but they look slightly different. Obviously one can overcome the differences, but unfamiliarity makes the apps harder to use and turns off newbies (or even experienced people who are sick of the "specialness"). (Kai's Power Tools is a classic offender in this regard - where are the controls in this screen shot and how do you use them? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kai%27s_Power_Tools.jpg). I could certainly be wrong, but this is professional rather than personal opinion, as someone with an HCI education. Sorry for the lack of citations. I do agree that aesthetics is to some degree subjective. I don't necessarily believe that we need it to be the standard MW look in all respects (though I personally like the consistency), but the wiki controls need to be consistent with other MW installs (most importantly, Wikipedia) so people can see easily that it's a wiki and in particular one they've used before. Reid -- I work for IBM, and sending this e-mail might be part of my job. However, I speak for myself only, not the company.

[I am putting the most interesting stuff at the beginning, but there are some responses in-line below too.] I spoke with Mako Hill, one of the principals at AcaWiki, last week and am now quite enthusiastic about the system. I believe the flaws can be fixed and we should take advantage of the small but present community which is hungry for new members. The key problem is hosting, and Mako shares this concern. It turns out that the current hosts (Creative Commons) also would like to transfer hosting somewhere else, as running a MediaWiki is not part of their core mission. So, our interests align. Thus, I propose that we move AcaWiki hosting to Referata, retaining all existing history and user accounts. If acawiki.referata.com is OK, then it can be done for free; if keeping the acawiki.org domain is important (in this case, the move would be completely transparent to users), then we'll need to find $50/mo; if keeping the existing skin is important (which think it is not - see below), then $80/mo. AcaWiki folks, what do you think about this? Have I mischaracterized anything about you above? I would be happy to lead this process (Mako gave me some technical people at CC to talk to) and could start on this in late April. (I have some unavoidable responsibilities in the next few weeks and won't have time until then.) Once this is done, I could then facilitate the other technical tasks which I offered to do (uploading existing stuff into AcaWiki). Hmm, looking again you are right. I'm not sure exactly what happened; perhaps I was confusing AcaWiki with something else. Anyway, I still don't like the AcaWiki default skin. I could provide a specific critique of the problems I see, but it might be better to simply offer a better one for comparison, which I am happy to do. At a high level, it's a little sloppy, it wastes important vertical space, and standard elements (e.g., search, login) are in nonstandard locations. On the other hand, the default MW skin is very professional looking and gets these things right. It's another aspect of separation of responsibilities - let people who are good at web design design the pages. That is true; however, many won't. Barriers to entry matter a lot more than one might think, even small ones. The basic theory is, folks who are new to a system don't care much about it and are easy to drive away by making small mistakes. On the other hand, if their initial experience is smooth and pleasant, and enables microcontributions right away, that builds emotional investment in the community and those people are more likely to come back and help build the community and the resource. Researchers in particular are very busy and (I claim) will have less patience than average to hassle with bad systems. Reid -- I work for IBM, and sending this e-mail might be part of my job. However, I speak for myself only, not the company.