Hoi,
There are many people who have been struggling with poor usability of
MediaWiki inside and outside of the Wikimedia Foundation. When the people
from this university are interested in working on usability, they will find
many people who have half ready solutions. They will find that improving
usability is not easy because it is a truly international environment. They
will find many people and organisations that will gladly work together,
experiment and learn what works best.
It would be lovely to increase the group of people who concentrate on the
usability of our beloved software.
Thanks,
GerardM
2008/12/2 Lennart Guldbrandsson <wikihannibal(a)gmail.com>
Hello,
I was recently at a conference for Swedish information specialists (yes, I
had a talk there). There I met a woman who taught at a university. The
subject: information architecture. They had groups of students improving
the
websites of several well known Swedish companies and organisations. Now,
they were seeking new websites to improve. We talked about them getting to
work on Wikipedia (of course without any commitments or strings attached)
and will continue to see if this is a feasible project. I will update this
thread as soon as I know more, but we should try everything we can to make
the threshold of Wikipedia and MediaWiki as low as possible.
Best wishes,
Lennart
--
Lennart Guldbrandsson, chair of Wikimedia Sverige and press contact for
Swedish Wikipedia // ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige och presskontakt för
svenskspråkiga Wikipedia
2008/12/2 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>
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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