[Wikimedia-l] Monobook was optimised for editors, Vector is more balanced between readers and edtors

When Vector was introduced the rationale was that "The monobook design is very "utilitarian" and optimized for editor usage. It can however also be cluttered, "busy", and confusing to readers. The Usability initiative is trying to strike a balance between both groups<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector#Did_I_ask_for_this… . Judging by subsequent trends I think they succeeded. Monobook is cluttered because it puts lots of editor options on the screen, Vector is "cleaner" because it puts most of those in sub menus. Of course there will be some experienced editors who quickly worked out where the various options were and for whom the occasional extra click is minimal overhead. But the theory and I suspect the reality is that a skin which set out to be more balanced between the needs of editors and readers has done precisely that, if you make editing options an extra click away then fewer editors will discover them. Now in an ideal world we would have a new editor experience that steadily introduced editors to additional options. Hiding some away means that fewer new editors will find them, and in general the more editors discover additional features and make use of them the more they are likely to contribute. Since Vector became the default our readership has grown faster than the internet whilst editorship has broadly stabilised. More tellingly the most dramatic drops have not been in the number of editors who start editing, or who do 5 edits, we can probably account for that drop just by looking at the impact of the edit filters. The big drops have been in the proportion of new editors who do their 100th or 1000th edit. So it looks to me that the people who introduced Vector did exactly what they intended, though of course there are many other factors that affect both readership and editorship. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, the better an encyclopaedia Wikipedia is the more we should be thinking about how to get more people to use it. But it would be interesting to see some stats on the relative retention and upgrading of editors who use monobook and Vector. Ideally we should get one language version of Wikipedia to test the two for a year, set half of new accounts to Vector and half to Monobook and then after a year compare the two groups of editors. Regards Jonathan Message: 1