One design aspect that has always bothered me about Wikipedia and Usemod is the questionmark used to denote page creation:
page that does not exist?
This is bad design for several reasons:
- It is non-obvious. A questionmark is associated with help and many sites in fact use such notation to explain terms. - It is easy to overlook. People not familiar with the way Wikipedia works will probably tend to ignore it the first times they see it. - It is ambigious. Since Wikipedia links are not underlined, it is not clear whether the questionmark refers to the whole term or only part of it.
It's also annoying in print, but Wikipedia fortunately already hides it when printing pages.
I encourage you to take a look at the design I have chosen for the infoAnarchy wiki:
http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/
Here non-existent pages are linked to with red links on gray background. This is non-ambigious, visible and intuitive, as I notice that many people experiment with these links.
Now, there's of course a reason questionmarks were chosen for the original design: accessibility. Questionmarks can be interpreted by text-to-speech readers so that blind and disabled users can interpret these links. Fortunately, the W3C has done a lot of accessibility work and this scheme is now no longer required. This page:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS-access
describes the features added to cascading style sheets specifically for text-to-speech browsers. My suggestion would be a short beep before and after the create-links (cue-before and cue-after properties). Note that these CSS propreties are interpreted by many modern speech browsers: http://www.w3.org/WAI/References/Browsing
This would be an easy way to improve usability for average users while not sacrificing accessibility.
Regards,
Erik
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
One design aspect that has always bothered me about Wikipedia and Usemod is the questionmark used to denote page creation:
page that does not exist?
You can change the default behaviour in your user preferences. Check "Highlight links to empty topics", and links to empty pages will be red, instead of the little blue question mark.
An aside: I know it's been brought up before, but that option is not clearly labeled.
Stephen G.
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You can change the default behaviour in your user preferences. Check "Highlight links to empty topics", and links to empty pages will be red, instead of the little blue question mark.
Thanks, I didn't know that! Of course I still think this should be the default..
Regards,
Erik
On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 02:24:20PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
You can change the default behaviour in your user preferences. Check "Highlight links to empty topics", and links to empty pages will be red, instead of the little blue question mark.
Thanks, I didn't know that! Of course I still think this should be the default..
That'd get my vote, too...
|From: Khendon jason@jasonandali.org.uk |Date: Sun, 22 Sep 2002 13:33:45 +0100 | |On Sun, Sep 22, 2002 at 02:24:20PM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote: |> > You can change the default behaviour in your user |> > preferences. Check "Highlight links to empty topics", |> > and links to empty pages will be red, instead of the |> > little blue question mark. |> |> Thanks, I didn't know that! Of course I still think this should be the |> default.. | |That'd get my vote, too... | |-- |Khendon (Jason Williams) |khendon@khendon.org.uk http://www.jasonandali.org.uk/jason/
The question marks are ugly and uninformative. It "reads" as "Huh?"
The highlight method is expressive and attractive. It "reads" as "There should be an article on this, but there isn't yet."
Tom Parmenter Ortolan88
The question marks are ugly and uninformative. It "reads" as "Huh?"
The highlight method is expressive and attractive. It "reads" as "There should be an article on this, but there isn't yet."
I agree, the default behavior should be changed. There's no question involved, so question marks are illogical and out of place.
Axel
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Axel Boldt wrote:
The question marks are ugly and uninformative. It "reads" as "Huh?"
The highlight method is expressive and attractive. It "reads" as "There should be an article on this, but there isn't yet."
I agree, the default behavior should be changed. There's no question involved, so question marks are illogical and out of place.
Axel
If the Wikipedians of the English Wikipedia wants to change that, so be it. But please do not change things like that on the other Wikipedia's whitout advise of those Wikipedia's. -- giskart
--- Giskart giskart@linux.be wrote:
Axel Boldt wrote:
The question marks are ugly and uninformative. It "reads" as "Huh?"
The highlight method is expressive and attractive.
It "reads" as "There should be an article on this, but there
isn't
yet."
I agree, the default behavior should be changed. There's no question involved, so question marks are illogical and out of place.
Axel
If the Wikipedians of the English Wikipedia wants to change that, so be it. But please do not change things like that on the other Wikipedia's whitout advise of those Wikipedia's. -- giskart
I am with you here Giskart. I find the question mark very self-explanatory and not out of place at all. imho, the example given with blue, red and green links is the one ugly. Given some of the conversations about color use on the fr.wiki, I suspect most would agree against giving encyclopedic content the color of a rainbow.
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Erik Moeller wrote:
Somebody else wrote:
You can change the default behaviour in your user preferences. Check "Highlight links to empty topics", and links to empty pages will be red, instead of the little blue question mark.
Thanks, I didn't know that! Of course I still think this should be the default.
I've been using highlighted links since before I knew what they were. I think that I must have clicked on the option by accident or something. Whenever I see the "?" links, I'm shocked at how uninterpretable it is, *especially* when the "?" follows a link of more than one word.
I never suggested switching defaults because of accessibility. But if that can be worked around now, then let's switch. (Current users' preferences should stay the same, however.)
-- Toby
Toby Bartels wrote:
I've been using highlighted links since before I knew what they were. I think that I must have clicked on the option by accident or something. Whenever I see the "?" links, I'm shocked at how uninterpretable it is, *especially* when the "?" follows a link of more than one word.
It used to was that if the link was more than one word, the whole thing got surrounded by brackets, ie:
...throughout the history of Foobaria? there were... ...throughout the [history of Foobaria]? there were...
This seems to have disappeared in phase III.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion VIBBER wrote:
Toby Bartels wrote:
I've been using highlighted links since before I knew what they were. I think that I must have clicked on the option by accident or something. Whenever I see the "?" links, I'm shocked at how uninterpretable it is, *especially* when the "?" follows a link of more than one word.
It used to was that if the link was more than one word, the whole thing got surrounded by brackets, ie:
...throughout the history of Foobaria? there were... ...throughout the [history of Foobaria]? there were...
This seems to have disappeared in phase III.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Yes, I remember that. It was much clearer than the current way of linking a phrase. Can we have it back, please?
Neil
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