G'day Steve,
On 5/21/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Yeah, I am liking this idea. Essentially the idea here it to move the notification from the page where you read to the page where you have attempted to edit but can't. In this way, when someone tries to edit, they get a friendly explanation of how to join the community. But if they are just trying to read, they don't have to see a notice that is probably fairly useless and bewildering to them.
It's even more confusing now that I see there's a phrase about "or to stop banned editors from editing". Is this such a common situation that it's worth mentioning? People there to read about GWB really don't need to know about the effect that a few recidivist prats occasionally have on our community...
Indeed. There's a suggestion W3C made about ... oooh ... nine years ago: "don't mention the mechanics". In practical terms, it means two things:
a) Your readers don't care how things work, just that they work. Don't give someone an explanation of how HTTP works when all they want to do is follow a link to look at Pokémon screenshots.
b) Don't assume that your readers will follow certain procedures to read your website. Don't say "click this anchor reference" when you could just as easily say "follow this link". If you assumed all your readers were Lynx users, and wrote "make this the active link, then press the right arrow on your keyboard", you'd confuse the heck out of anyone using Internet Explorer.
I think we need to be conscious of something like that on Wikipedia. For example, in those damned {{test}} templates, people keep re-inserting the words "or reverted" in the bog-standard "your test worked, and has been removed". Why do editors making tests care about the Wikipedia keyword "revert"? The template exists to reassure testers that their changes did no lasting damage, and to invite them to kindly stop making them, please.
Likewise, why should a person trying to read about Lyndon LaRouche[0] need to know that that scurrilous bastard Adam Carr used his influence with the Cabal to get the LaRouchites banned from editing LaRouche articles[1]?
Our love for making new rules for each other to follow displays itself in peculiar ways. Not only do we fill our Wikipedia lives with unnecessary procedure, but we then go on to *boast* about it to completely uninterested editors. "Look," we seem to be saying, "on George W. Bush we have a mechanism to keep banned users from editing! Isn't that great? Click this anchor reference to read about the policies we followed when we banned his arse! How would you like to stop studying for your high school essay and start reading about ArbCom? If you want, you can click this other anchor reference. Whee!"
There's a region between "being transparent" and "confusing the heck out of our readers because we're so fond of little pastel boxes", and it's a region we really need to be inhabiting.
[0] I've really got to stop using this fellow in all my examples. Fortunately, nobody actually reads what I write, so probably nobody's noticed the pattern yet.
[1] Hi, Peter! You're in good company!