On 10 April 2011 16:05, Sarah slimvirgin@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Apr 10, 2011 at 13:54, phoebe ayers phoebe.wiki@gmail.com wrote:
- "how do I delete an article?" and its counterpart: "why was my
article deleted?"
- "how do I merge/split an article?"
- "hey, can I reference a blogpost in this article?"
There are formatting questions that aren't so easy to figure out either:
- "how do I put a footnote in an article?"
- "how do I find and insert an infobox?"
In fact a lot of those issues are spelled out very clearly. See [[WP:BLOGS]] for whether you can reference a blogpost. See [[WP:INCITE]] for a quick way to add a footnote. See [[Category:Infobox templates]] for how to add an infobox.
See now, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Look at that lovely alphabet soup. I bet nobody can explain why the shortcut to the page on how to add references sounds like something involving rioting in the streets.
And how would a new user even have the funniest idea about categories, let alone templates?
Actually, there's a huge bugaboo - all the templates that are used all over the place. Most users aren't able to write them, and we get back to the WSIWYG issues of unclear information on the editing screen when they're used. Between templates and wikitables, there are big parts of the project that turn into absolute mysteries when the user clicks "Edit".
Incidentally, part of the [[WP:INCITE]] page is incorrect: List defined references don't look like that in the editing screen.
The deletion process does look daunting, but actually if you just clunk through the instructions, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AfD#How_to_list_pages_for_deletion it's pretty easy, and I say that as someone with a template phobia.
Keeping in mind that I too am an experienced editor, it still took me nearly 5 minutes plus several open tabs to file an AfD the other day. I keep being told "just install Huggle/Twinkle/Friendly/some other script" but because I work on a wide range of browsers, these cause problems for me. Having said that, the main issue was time and number of steps, not legibility or physical difficulty.
We work on a complex website that caters to lots of different needs and skill levels, so there's a limit to how simple these processes can be made.
Agreed, but the things that we expect even a beginning editor to do should be as simple and easily found as possible. Citing references, in particular, is buried in bits and pieces all over the place. A newbie who manages to find [[WP:INCITE]] and follows its instructions is still just as likely to be trouted because they didn't use the "right" style of references for the article ("Sorry, Wikiproject:XXX requires that only Harvard style references be used in articles under our aegis. Please resubmit your edit, properly formatted.") We can do better.
Risker/Anne