On 1/14/07, Sören Auer soeren@pediax.org wrote:

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Why not opt-out? If it's a good feature, we should take the step of giving it to people by default. If it's too intrusive, perhaps we can finetune it?

I guess the intrusiveness will be the least problem. If you add this feature to Wikipedia per default, Wikipedia servers would have to be doubled, at least (each such preview counts on the server side like accessing a complete article).

Sören

If you make it opt-out you will simply lose a lot of editors who aren't tech-savvy. The reason Wikipedia has a plethora of tech articles compared to other areas may be that the majority of Wiki editors are people who spend a lot of time on-line. There are other editors, plugging away in non-tech subject areas who aren't that tech-savvy, who would simply bow out if faced with pop-ups on their first edit. It's the tech-savvy who are most likely to understand that they have options and opt-in, and the non tech-savvy who would be least able to figure out how to opt-out. Given that it doesn't make sense to make it opt-out. Also, the whole world isn't on-line at the rate of the Western-world. I used a friend's clunker machine, with a stone-age modem, and I think the pop-ups would crash the system. So, it's also those with the lease capacity to opt-out (namely because their machine crashes when they log in), who could be most impacted. Again, opt-out of the heavy tech requirements is not the sensible option. Opt-in for the tech savvy who will always look for it, is sensible. My siblings, all of whom are uber tech-savvy, can't sign up for a web site without spending the first few minutes configuring the site for their preferences--I realize now, for the first time, that adding things like this pop-ups program are what they are doing.

KP