On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 6:39 PM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.comwrote:
Hoi, The software has been tested but not all extensions are considered ready for WMF production. I am establishing contacts with, among others, people at UNICEF to make sure that we identify the outstanding issues carefully and fix them efficiently. Given that the CreatePage extension requires changes to the skin, it may make sense to consider using a superset of monobook (I do not know how feasible this is).
Could you please elaborate on the individual extensions, as to what they do? There are already ways to have inputboxes to create new articles, and to have templates preloaded in to them (the former can be seen on the homepage of the hu.wikinews; the latter I've seen in action on some Wikiproject pages). If it is really only a question of starting an article, maybe instead of working on a new extension we could merely put these kind of inputboxes on the homepages of the new/smaller projects (or teach the community how to do it, and let them decide). I have to confess, though, that I am a bit sceptical about this: Hungarian Wikipedia has no prominent "create article" link on its homepage and there are new articles every day from new users, while Wikiquote has one, and there no more than a dozen new articles in a whole month.
Best regards, Bence Damokos
Given that the software is already being localised at Betawiki, we do not need to restrict ourselves to English. I understand that UNICEF uses some of their software in Swahili :) I would love to consider Swahili for this ... Kennisnet is interested in this functionality, that would make Dutch an option. It needs to be clear that it is not only Wikipedia projects that will benefit.
The benefits from a more useable interface have little to do with a "simple" approach. Newbies are not able to contribute. Our need for more contributors and content is most dire in our smallest projects. Personally I am not that interested in using "simple" as a test environment. From my perspective, it should be there for all the projects that want it. Obviously, when this extension is localised first, it will be more effective.
When we are to test this in a Wikimedia Wiki, we need to get involvement from Brion. It would help a lot when the WMF actively takes part in this collaboration and make usability a priority. Thanks, GerardM
2008/12/1 Nathan nawrich@gmail.com
GerardM - what steps need to be taken to begin testing and adapting the UNICEF usability extensions? Where would be a good project to begin - perhaps the Simple English Wikipedia, if that community is amenable? That its in English might make development easier, and a more usable interface might fit with the philosophy of the Simple wiki.
Milos - you wrote: "To be honest, I was thinking that the most useful Wikimedian project in Serbia is English Wikipedia, but I was wrong.
Serbian
Wikipedia is the most useful project, even it has ~30 times less articles than en.wp." Can I ask how you arrived at this change of mind? It makes sense to me that a reference in the common language of Serbia is more useful than one that is not, but since you originally believed the opposite I'm curious to know what data changed your mind.
Moreschi - What you advocate is basically cultural imperialism, which is
a
recipe for conflict and disruption - not education. Making knowledge available to as many people as possible is the goal; if those people
don't
speak English, they should not be excluded. As others have noted, it is much easier and much more in line with our goal to find contributors who can build suitable references in all languages. To your point that these references are likely to have poor quality anyway - I'm not sure that
makes
sense logically. A small community does not necessarily equal poor
quality
content; I imagine that the size of the community correlates with the volume of content, and while there are less people to police quality issues
there
is less content to police.
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