Re: [Wikitech-l] Some problems with Wikipedia's iD

I thought this would be a good forum to bring up some interaction design problems with Wikipedia. These are some of the problems I found as an active contributor who also happens to be an interaction designer. 1. Wikipedia shows only the last edit of an article in the watch list. This leaves the writer no clue of the edits that took place from his/her base lined version. (Base lined version will generally be the user's last edit on the article.). Some kind of visualization technique on all the edits only can give the writer a sense of the course taken by the article. 2. Too many entries in watch list make it very difficult to clear them on a day. Some kind of prioritization needs to be done...like ignoring the minor edits...or flagging a. the articles which are more prone to vandalism or b. an article where some real interesting edits are happening or c. articles on which some of your trusted buddies are working on... 3. When you work on more than a few articles, it is very natural that you might find a same set of people working on those or similar articles. Wikipedia could encourage collaboration by allowing me to watch any articles edited by my buddies. (Of course, only if my buddy agrees to it, which I would think he would, for it is a chance for both of us to write a quality article.) 4. When you start with an article, it is very probable that you would be interested in editing related articles. e.g.: If you start with Satyajit Ray, you might be interested in editing/reviewing the articles for Bengali cinema, or Mrinal Sen or Italian Neo-realist Cinema or the Apu Trilogy. One simple heuristic that could help meet the similar goals would be to allow the user to watch all the articles that link to a particular article or watch all the articles that have been manually grouped as categories. The feature "Related Changes" tries to do something similar, but lists the changes to the articles listed only on your watch list. I believe that encouraging people to collaborate better and giving users better idea of how articles are changing over time would help Wikipedia improve the quality of articles tremendously. Guess what? Interaction Design can bring a real difference again.