On 9/19/06, Kirill Lokshin <kirill.lokshin(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 9/18/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net>
wrote:
I speak as a long-time Wikipedian who is more
interested in content than
pretty presentation. I had a hand in helping develop the early versions
of taxoboxes, and descriptive boxes for battles. To some extent the use
of charts and tables is essential for organizing data. But when we
reach a point that changing the content of these charts and boxes is a
mysterious process for the average user, or when it is only with great
difficulty that one even finds what page to edit, then we have to
consider the possibility that we have gotten away from the essential
principal that this is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
When we speak of Wikipedia as a site that anyone can edit that means
more to me than permission. That permission is hollow if a person lacks
the techniques to do it. In the earliest time we took pride in the fact
that wiki-markup was so simple that anyone could understand it; the
essentials could be put on a single page that did not even need to be
scrolled. Someone could edit without having to learn html. Can we
still honestly say that a retired professor in the arts and humanities
is still able to contribute from his vast experience? His familiarity
with his subject may be unquestionable, but his expertise preceeded the
cyber-age and did not depend on familiarity with computer languages.
I strongly disagree. Our goal here must fundamentally be to produce
an encyclopedia for the reader rather than merely to engage in the
perpetual process of editing it.
There's no reason this has to be mutually exclusive since #2 helps #1.
I'll explain in a bit. But you must admit editing has become quite complex.
1. We used to use CamelCase syntax for linking to BobNey
2. Then it became [[Bob Ney]] with free links
3. Add a template like {{current}}
4. Then add an infobox like {{Infobox Congressman
| name=Robert William Ney
| image name=Bob Ney.jpg
5. Then add inline references like
<ref>[http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001532.php DOJ press
release on Ney's plea]</ref>
6. Add some tables, images, categories, etc.
I used to be a programmer/coder, so I'm not scared of funky code and
symbols. But even my eyes glaze over when I need to decipher a
taxobox, an inline
reference or a table. Unless I'm really determined, I avoid editing it.
Even for doing images, it's way too hard. That's not good.
For those not at Wikimania hacking days, there were two presentations
relevant to this issue of "user experience" while editing.
1) One was a presentation from OpenUsability which provided a good
evaluation of user testing on editing Wikipedia pages.
http://www.openusability.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=950
We needed a good friend to tell us - images and commons are
way too hard for the average person to decipher. Licenses confusing,
too many steps, what the hell is Commons, is my login the same?
The presentation was received warmly - the developers in the room
all know this is a big problem with putting in images.
2) WIKIWYG and parsing. Certainly a next logical step for WP is
WYSIWYG editing, or at least the option of it. Some people like the
power of markup, but for newbies graphical (ie. MS Word) editing
would be more inclusive. For that you need markup->WYSIWYG->markup
conversion. Well one of the [[Google Summer of Code]] participants spent
his summer trying to create a "parser" to do just that. He failed. And not
for lack of smarts, but because everyone recognizes what a rats
nest Wikimarkup syntax is, having morphed over the years haphazardly.
Every developer in the room had compassion for the young chap who
tried it, and everyone recognized how incredibly hard a problem this is.
So the prospect of that conversion is grim, at least right now, without a
major breakthrough, or altering Wikimarkup syntax to be more "normal"
and running a script to change all "n" million articles. Yikes.
Producing a high-quality
encyclopedia necessarily means allowing a somewhat more sophisticated
set of layout and content presentation tools than the retired
professor may be willing to learn -- but this is only a problem
insofar as the professor *needs* to learn those tools. Just as we do
not expect all users to be equally capable of taking high-quality
photographs, writing FAs, or any of a variety of other tasks, we
should not expect that all users will be equally capable of working on
complex issues of templatized design and layout.
Understandable attitude but disconcerting. Some view Wikimarkup the same
way as a "tech literacy test" to act as a bozo filter. (See [[Literacy test]])
I'm not a fan of, "Keeping it hard keeps it elite."
The retired professor, in your example, is most likely
here to
contribute content rather than to play around with the aesthetics of
little colored boxes; the overwhelming majority of his exposure to
templates will be either simply including them -- but usually there's
no shortage of volunteers to do this anyways -- or using them as black
boxes for data, like so
I would contend that this "retired" professor even seeing the arcane
boxes and such would be intimdated enough not to even dive into it.
And I have first-hand knowledge of such a case.
When I visited the Wikimedia Foundation in Florida last month,
the dean of a prominent US college contacted the office, and she
said she was an enthusiastic fan of Wikipedia, and thought it was
great. But she also said that it was darn intimidating to edit, when
she saw all that Wikimarkup. She wanted to contribute to areas
for which she is a published author! But Wikimarkup is too hard
and intimidating.
So this was not a "retired" professor but a professor and dean,
at the top of her game, with enthusiastic interest, who was
intimidated.
There is absolutely no reason, in most cases, for said
professor to
concern himself with how {{Infobox Clown}} transforms the values he
enters into a pretty table; if he's particularly interested in layout
issues, he can always ask someone for help if he can't figure things
out.
You should observe some user testing sometime to see exactly
how people react to these situations. The frustration threshold
for users is typically very low.
Forcing everyone else to abandon all the sophisticated
presentation
tools we've developed, meanwhile, will drastically decrease the
quality of page layout in the encyclopedia, and won't help the
professor in the least, as the nice "black box" template will either
be replaced with a fragile table, or nothing at all -- neither of
which is something he'll be particularly pleased to work with, I
suspect.
It does not have to be mutualy exclusive. It's a hard problem,
but they are not inherently at odds.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)