Greetings,
Amir E. Aharoni a écrit :*
If i understand correctly - and please correct me if i'm wrong - the current big Usability project is essentially a rather cosmetic change of the default skin. It is not really bad and i'm not really opposed to it, as many other users are, but it seems that it doesn't address a very big usability problem
- the fact that Wikimedia Commons is hardly accessible for people who don't
English well.
The "current big Usability project" you're talking about is mainly about improving the *editing* experience of users. There is a separate team working specifically about the User experience related to multimedia participation, and focusing on Wikimedia Commons. I invite you to read http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:About for a summary. All the documentation is published on the usability wiki, so you can dive as deep as you like from the Multimedia hub: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Multimedia:Hub
Sure, it's possible to translate to translate templates and system messages to other languages and set the default language in the preferences, but this is very far from actually achieving the goal of making Commons the main media repository for all other WMF projects in all languages.
Yes. Improving the user experience to address the multilingual nature of Wikimedia Commons is on the list of high priority issues we want to try and resolve.
And it's kinda symbolic that Commons will be the first project where the default skin will be switched.
The choice of Commons was made in agreement with the Operations team, who didn't want to switch to the new skin on a very high-traffic website such as Wikipedia. Turning the switch on Commons first provides more flexibility and allows things to be fixed before the Interwebs explode.
Now, before i start writing about the problems that i found in detail, this is probably something that was already discussed. If it indeed was, please point me to it (thanks in advance). If it was not discussed deeply, i'll probably start a discussion page somewhere.
I think we have already extensively listed the main issues during the preliminary research phase, but we may of course have missed something. If your problems aren't already in the documentation I linked above, feel free to add a new item to http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Usability_issues_and_ideas