I did not write that, except for the final sentence--The rest was an earlier comment by someone who actually knows programming, not my elementary awareness of html and the rudiments of regular expressions. The only software I've ever developed is some VBA macros for Excel.
I was saying that just the most elementary knowledge is enough for talk pages. Of all the parts of Wikipedia syntax, it's the easiest. The problems for users in learning things is elsewhere. Even things I do know how to use, like the cite templates or tables, I find too complicated to bother with. What I think the usability studies show to be the hardest--and also my own experience teaching raw beginners--, is figuring just how to edit in the first place. We think we made it easy, but they still don;t find it.
As for keeping track of discussions generally, the exchanges here show the difficulties, and this one is as good an example as any for how easily it is to get confused (in this case I think what did it is other comments coming between what I was answering and my own reply--the same problems as caused by edit conflicts. I'm not sure there is any way to sort it out when a number of people are talking about the same thing at the same time.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG
On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 4:24 PM, William Pietri william@scissor.com wrote:
On 12/19/2009 10:54 AM, David Goodman wrote:
On Sat, Dec 19, 2009 at 1:17 PM, William Pietriwilliam@scissor.com wrote:
As a software developer, I'm perfectly comfortable dealing with its dark mysteries. I've spent tens of thousands of hours typing mysterious codes into giant files interpreted by unforgiving machines. But for the 98% of humanity that doesn't have much technical background, our discussion system comes across as somewhere between perplexing and actively hostile.
mysterious codes? All that is needed is knowing how to indent and sign.
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
For a person with a PhD in molecular biology, a master's degree in Library Science, and 3 years experience on Wikipedia, I'm sure it all seems pretty transparent. As somebody who played with punch card machines in kindergarten and was coding well before my voice changed, it sure looks that way to me. But we're pretty far out on a few different bell curves.
I haven't seen an actual usability study on our current discussion system, but I have seen and done plenty of other usability studies, and my guess is that you'd get a combined drop-out plus failure rate of over 80% for first-time users. Followed by predictable reactions: discouragement, feeling dumb, and taking both the system and our community as hostile or unwelcoming.
Whether we want to attract less technical and/or less persistent users is a reasonable question. (My view: we should.) But from the usability experts I've worked with, I think the nicest reaction they'd give to our current discussion system is politely disguised horror. If people are skeptical of that, I'd encourage them to reach out to our very sharp usability team; I'm sure they have opinions on this, and possibly some data.
William
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