I see where you're coming from Tony, but ultimately, you can't herd cats. A campaign against jargon is only going to make minimal headway.
The are some structural things that Wikipedia needs to do: 1) WYSIWYG would be fantastic, but I've no idea what that would meet in practice.
Sticking to the achievable:
2) That need for posts to be signed with ~~~~ is counterintuitive. If I create an account on any other site, a sig in a discussion is unnecessary. I assume liquid threads would rid us of this? Is there another way?
3) The growing use of protection on high profile articles needs more discussion. There used to be a principle that the more an article was visible the less we should protect it. (After all people are told "anyone can edit" and high profile articles are watched enough to revert quickly.) We now seem to have reversed this - with the attitude that the article is now fairly good, and most IP edits are unhelpful. But the outsider comes in by experimentation. Actually, I'm a supporter of more liberal semi-protection (particularly on BLPS) but I'd use it on marginal articles where incoming edits are under-scrutinised - not one those where it is a hassle to vandal-fighters, but we always catch them.
4) Perhaps we need more integration with other social network and internet platforms. I mean, Amazon has seen the potential for someone reading a Wikipedia article to buy a book - but the reverse is true. Please buying books on Italian History are precisely the people we need to help us with articles on Italian history. Facebookers with an interest in Pokemon are precisely the people who can (and have the time to) help improve out deficiency in Pokemon articles...(ok, maybe not, but you get the point!)
5) I see the growing use of {{talkback}} templates. Personally, I hate them. However, the assumption that everyone masters watchlists and knows how to find discussions - and sees replies people make to them in any one of 27 noticeboards, talk pages etc is also counter intuitive. Could we develop software that flagged a user when someone replies to their post, wherever the reply might be? So if I post anywhere and someone posts indented below, I get some form of automatic notification? I don't know how it would work - but Facebook's beauty is that wherever I comment, or wherever someone comments about me, I get notified - that tends to keep me interested in continuing the discussions rather than drifting off. Watchlists were great in 2002, but they are part of an increasingly tired looking infrastructure.
Just some thoughts. I suspect to solve these problems would need some serious investment - but I just see Wikipedia slowly becoming dated. (Of course those who grew up on it will say it is "fine" - but then that's the way with everything.)
Scott
-----Original Message----- From: wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikien-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Tony Sidaway Sent: 22 December 2010 10:55 To: English Wikipedia Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia
The single best way to improve usability of Wikipedia would be to scale back the use of jargon.
if you look at early discussions in those days they were usually held in plain English, with very little jargon. I've tried to keep up that style, but it is now quite rare.
I don't see why this should be. Our policies have perfectly good English language names, "Neutral point of view", "What Wikipedia is Not", "Verifiability", and so on. There's absolutely no need to replace these English phrases with gobbledygook.
We have no strictures against this exclusive practice, mainly because it was seen as obviously undesirable in the early days. But communities inevitably acquire exclusive practices as they develop--it's seen as one way to identify yourself to other people as a member of the "in" group. And so now when I discuss matters on Wikipedia talk pages even I, an editor since 2004, find myself shuddering inwardly at the impact of all the alphabet soup. If the damage this practice does to the openness of the community were more widely recognised it would be possible for us to agree to scale it back, but it just isn't on the map.
in all conscience I cannot see anything wrong with our user interface. It's exemplary, and its having changed so little in all this time is good evidence of that. If we were to try to emulate monstrosities like the ever-changing Facebook it would be a step backwards from our unflinching commitment to a good, clean, simple interface.
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