Gerard Meijssen wrote:
It is hardly relevant what the demographics of the
test group is. 100%
failure in Tanzania, well educated people in Austria failing to get to grips
with Wikipedia, we get people informing us about our perceived security
problem. The reason why it is hardly relevant is because the same studies
show that the changes implemented made a measurable difference. There is no
point finding fault at this. Even when a different demographic would be less
disastrously bad, there is a solution that is known to improve the odds of
finding people collaborating on a MediaWiki installation.
Known to whom? I am testing the CreatePage extension on
http://www.appropedia.org and I find it harder to use than the usual way
of creating pages.
First I have to enter the page name and click on "Create Page" - OK, the
usual.
But then I have to choose a layout. I have no idea what a layout is,
what layout should I choose, nor how will the layout I choose look.
When I choose one at random, I get to the actual edit page. The only
improvement I see here is that buttons above the edit field have textual
description, which is something that, now that I see it, I find quite
useful :) The form is several screens long which I find frightening,
Save button is lost under the form, it is not obvious what a section is
(of course, that is not obvious right now, but this doesn't help much),
and there is no practical way to reorder the sections. To the right is a
list of categories that, on a real Wikipedia, would be completely
unusable (and by the way, Commons solved this problem when uploading a
picture in a much better way).
Keep it wiki, keep it simple. People love to share their knowledge, not
to fill forms.