Gerard,
You seem to have completely missed my point. At which stage in the
process did they fail?
It's like answering the question "why do cars crash?" with "they
failed to not crash."...
No, I don't have experience with small projects. That comment was
based on my experience with en.wp, where red links seem to have gone
out of fashion (and not because they're unnecessary).
Mike
On 2 Dec 2008, at 15:00, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi,
They failed their task. Their task was to create a new article.
There are
many people who fail at this.
When you state that "those seem to be getting increasingly rare", I
wonder
if you have experience with small and starting projects. It is a
recurring
theme and it is a major reason for the failure of projects. I
completely
agree with you that there are many more pain points. The trick is
to solve
the issues that are easy to solve first. From this we can progress
to a next
issue.
Thanks,
GerardM
2008/12/2 Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net>
Where did they fail? Did they fail to find a red
link to create an
article? (those seem to be getting increasingly rare) Could they not
find a subject to start a new article on? Were they unable to type
text into the appropriate box and submit it? Were they unable to
structure the article well enough? Were they unable to wikify it?
Were they unable to categorize it? Did they fail to add an infobox or
a picture? Were they unable to get it to GA/FA status?
There's lots of failure points; which ones caused the problems, and
are there simple tweaks that can be made to sort out the problems?
Mike
On 2 Dec 2008, at 13:23, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi,
You do not create a new article by finding the "edit" button. The
task all
these people failed at was creating a whole new article.
Thanks,
GerardM
2008/12/2 Ilario Valdelli <valdelli(a)gmail.com>
On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> Over the last weeks I have been rather active in promoting
> improved
> usability for the MediaWiki software. What really got me going was
learning
> from a Wikimania presentation that a UNICEF usability study
> done in
Tanzania
> showed that 100% of the test subjects were unable to create a new
article.
> UNICEF has created extensions to improve on this, extensions that
> make a
> difference. The fact that our usability is poor does not only
> hurt what
some
> call "minority languages". A professor in Austria I know, a
> veteran user
of
> software, was also hard pressed to collaborate on a wiki.
>
The problem for usability is that sometime there is not a better
selection of users to have a "real" sampling.
Naturally if this sampling is formed by users with a poor or no
knowledge of computers, probably they will not have problems with
Wikipedia because they would not able to switch on a computer. The
usability, in this case is the minor problem.
Probably is better to know if they were not able to use the edit
button because the edit button is not "usable" or if they were not
able because they don't have seen an "edit" button in the past.
Ilario
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