One thing that is undoubtedly good is that users now have the choice of displaying lists
like the interwiki links, or not. The system seems to do a reasonable job remembering a
user's preferences. Someone who prefers the interwiki links hidden can get them off
his screen with a click.
But the interwiki links should be there when a user first comes to the site. In particular
as the single word "Languages" on the left does not make it immediately apparent
that you can view an Arabic, Spanish or Hebrew article on the same topic you are currently
looking up. This is a big part of what Wikipedia's mission is about.
People in Europe and Asia are more likely to speak several WP languages than people in the
US or UK. I would bet money that non-native English speakers, who represent a very
substantial proportion of en:WP readers, make greater use of the interwiki links in en:WP
than native speakers.
Andreas
--- On Sun, 6/6/10, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
From: Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
To: "Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List"
<foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Date: Sunday, 6 June, 2010, 16:40
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 4:21 PM, David
Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
At the English Wikipedia, this is not so. If we
had
a bike shed,
there would be daily complaints about its color.
I should say that *almost no* users complain about small
things. A
tiny group of committed users will complain about small
things, but
they're not the targets of the Usability Initiative, so
their
complaints are not relevant here, *except* insofar as they
provide
reasoning or evidence about what most users think. By
contrast,
complaints from occasional users are useful in usability
discussions
even if the users provide no reasoning, because the
complaints are
ipso facto evidence of a problem. (But if we have
only anecdotal
evidence of complaints from occasional users, of course,
that needs to
be treated with the same caution as any anecdotal
evidence.)
I've encountered many complaints about
clutter at the
English
Wikipedia (pertaining to articles, our main page
and
other pages), but
not one complaint that the interwiki links caused
clutter.
My first guess would be that people didn't complain about
interwiki
links' clutter because they've always been there. By
the time you're
comfortable enough with the site to complain, you just
won't notice
them. I'd guess that the complaints you see are when
things *change*.
Experienced users are prone to complain when things
change, because
they've gotten used to how things are. If we leave
off the links for
a year, then turn them back on, I predict we'd get
complaints about
clutter.
However, assuming that the interwiki links
benefit a
relatively small
percentage of users (still a non-negligible
number in
absolute terms),
I've yet to see evidence that displaying them
by
default is
problematic. Like David Gerard, I desire access
to
the data behind
this decision.
Then say exactly what evidence you desire. What test
would you
suggest to see whether hiding the links helped or harmed
things?
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 1:30 AM, David Levy <lifeisunfair(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Said data indicated only that the interwiki links
were
used relatively
infrequently. Apparently, there is absolutely no
data suggesting that
the full list's display posed a problem.
Rather,
this is a hunch
based upon the application of a general design
principle whose
relevance has not been established.
Aryeh Gregor: You cited the importance of data (and
the systematic
analysis thereof). In light of this explanation,
what is your opinion
now?
Data is important. It's also not always possible to
gather. When
multiple things are competing for attention, you can make
one or the
other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more
clicks.
But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a
good thing or
a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually
want, or are
people being distracted from what they actually want?
If we have more
clicks on interlanguage links and less on other interface
elements, is
that good or bad? If we wanted to maximize clicks on
interlanguage
links, we could always put them above the article text, so
you have to
scroll through them to get to the article text . . . but
that's
obviously ridiculous.
As Greg said above, data is important, but it can be hard
to apply
correctly. Sometimes you really have to use
judgment. But we could
still use more data -- for instance, why do people usually
click
interlanguage links? Do they usually understand the
language they're
reading the article in, or not? We could have a
little
multiple-choice question that pops up a small percentage of
the time
when people click on an interlanguage link.
My suspicion is that a long list is not ideal. Yes,
people will see
it for what it is and they'll be able to find their
language easily
enough if they look. But it's distracting, and it's
not obvious
without (in some cases) a lot of scrolling whether there's
anything
below it. If we could use some heuristic to pick a
few languages to
display, with a prominent "More" link at the bottom, I
suspect that
would be superior.
But first we should gather data on click rates for the list
fully
expanded and unexpanded. Per-page click rates are
important here --
many articles have no interlanguage links, so will
obviously pull down
the average click rate despite being unaffected by the
change. What's
the trend like as articles have more interlanguage
links? How many
more interlanguage clicks are there for articles in twenty
languages
as opposed to five? Can we plot that? For each
wiki separately, for
preference?
All this data gathering takes manpower to do, of
course. Maybe the
usability team doesn't have the manpower. If so, does
anyone
qualified volunteer? If not, we have to make
decisions without data
-- and that doesn't automatically mean "keep the status
quo", nor
"change it back if people complain loudly". It means
someone who
happens to be in charge of making the decision needs to
make a
judgment call, based on all the evidence they have
available.
(By the way, I'm not an employee of Wikimedia and am
sometimes not at
all happy with how the usability team operates. I
happen to think
that they have a good point in this case, though,
irrespective of how
they made or enforced the decision.)
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