On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 10:02:07 -0800, Kesava Mallela kesava@gmail.com wrote:

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.

1) I would also like more than the latest edit to be shown. At least "4 more edits" or similar if that helps the database load. 2) http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1492 "Multiple watchlists" - 0 votes, 0 patches, 4 comments, 0 people on the CC list. 3) Could be done by looking at recent edits, but anyway I think this is too database intensive and of limited usefulness. 4) I don't understand exactly what you mean...?

On Thu, 24 Feb 2005 10:02:07 -0800, Kesava Mallela kesava@gmail.com wrote:

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.

I believe work related to the "e-notif" patch has implemented a link which shows the difference between the current version and the version that you last viewed, which goes some way towards this. That doesn't, of course, give you the list of *summaries* for those edits, but you can get that out of the page history easily enough anyway, I guess.

As for visualising a whole sequence of edits, that's certainly a laudable aim, but in practice it's not so easy. For the moment, you can page through the diffs (with the new "next" and "previous" links). Some people have suggested a "blame" feature (like CVS repositories provide) which shows in which edit each part of an article was introduced; but it has been pointed out that unlike source code, encyclopedia articles [or other content likely to be contained in a MediaWiki] doesn't divide neatly into lines, so the resulting display would be that much coarser, and thus less useful - I might correct one typo, and the whole paragraph would end up annotated as my edit. And then there was IBM's "history flow" experiment [http://www.research.ibm.com/history/index.htm] which is certainly fascinating, but whether or not it can be put to generic and practical use I'm not sure...

Meanwhile, some overall container which could provide standard features and interface to Special:Recentchanges, Special:Recentchangeslinked and Special:Watchlist would certainly be nice - for instance, the global recent changes is filterable and has collapsible groupings for multiple edits to the same article. Obviously, some things are harder in the database than others, but it would certainly be useful for all three pages to have this and more...