On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 12:23:02PM -0600, Daniel Cannon wrote:
What the usability study found, to my understanding,
was that MediaWiki was
not particularly newbie-friendly; that is, its usability among new users was
low. That said, MediaWiki surely has a steeper learning curve than most
webware; however, it has a large group of power users who have found the
various "oddities" of the software that confuse new users to be quite useful
in increasing their productivity. By analogy, the modality of vim often
confuses the hell out of new users to that software, yet it has become a
feature that experienced users simply could not live without. Vim is never
going to do away with its modal editing to become more "user-friendly";
similarly, I do not favor the idea of sacrificing the expert usability of
MediaWiki to make the software more friendly to new users. Such a change, I
fear, would certainly do just that--confuse expert users and hinder their
productivity with the software.
Huzzah!
What You See Is All You Get, indeed.
I personally would object to such a change, and I do
not feel any change to
be necessary; however, I'm more than willing to discuss and experiment with
this and other options. If you could perchance provide some samples of this
change, preferably on complex pages with multiple images, tables, and
templates intermingled with text, that could certainly help to gauge the
degree of my objection. I would, however, strongly caution against making
large, breaking changes on the basis of this single usability study without
considering the possible repercussions of such changes outside the context
of the points addressed by the study.
On this front, my only comment is "test it on a Blackberry". :-)
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra(a)baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates
http://baylink.pitas.com '87 e24
St Petersburg FL USA
http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274