Hoi, Usability research done by UNICEF on MediaWiki, by English language people in Tanzania had 100% of their test subjects failing to create a new article. This research is repeatable, and it is easy to improve on this because UNICEF created extensions that will be part of the initial research. The Uniwiki extensions are being tested elsewhere and bugfixes to make it work with the latest MediaWiki have been supplied.
People like myself positively HATE editing English language Wikipedia because of all the crap that is considered "must have" like citations, info boxes et al. Wikia has worked on software that separates the crap from the text. This means that it will become a lot easier to edit Wikipedia text.
When the usability of MediaWiki is improved, people will be encouraged to contribute to MediaWiki projects. It will be really hard to make the convoluted policies of the different Wikipedias clear. Many policies exist that on the face of it makes sense. However, when you combine them all, you get a mess that prevents people from contributing. I recently declined to write an en.wp article because I am hesitant because of all this.
Realistically, in order to make MediaWiki and Wikipedia more usable, there are two aspects. There are technical aspects that will make it easy to contribute and there are the community aspects. For the Stanton project to do the technical aspects is a no brainer; obviously they will experiment with all the technical bits and bobs and make a difference. To get some traction on the community aspects, it takes a community that acknowledges that cleanup is needed.
When both technical and community issues are addressed, many more people will edit but be realistic, the biggest difference will be in the other Wikipedias because that is where the growth still has to happen. This is in turn dependent on the quality of the Internationalisation that is part of the Stanton project and the Localisation that is done at Betawiki. Thanks, GerardM
2009/1/10 emijrp emijrp@gmail.com
Hi all;
I would like to know how is going to be rated the success of this operation/project. Do you hope a big wave of new users? More edits per day? To improve the visits/edits ratio? What are your wishes and your realistic predictions?
Regards, emijrp
Naoko Komura escribió:
On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 3:19 PM, mbimmler@gmail.com wrote:
<snip>
Erik/Naoko: does the Stanton grant include a condition for (external) specific program evaluation?
Yes, we are required to submit a quarterly report to the Stanton
Foundation
to inform the project progress and status which includes financial
report.
Best,
- Naoko
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