We should try to find the most reasonable default user options possible. Here's some data from the English Wikipedia (11474 users) on the number of users who have changed each option from the default:
-----------------------------
skin=1 (nostalgia): 403 skin=2 (cologne): 991
hover=0: 52 underline=0: 2332 highlightbroken=0: 580 justify=1: 417 hideminor=1: 226 usenewrc=1: 362 numberheadings=1: 202 rememberpassword=1: 4735 editondblclick: 147 watchdefault: 213 minordefault: 160 previewontop: 831 nocache: 4
-----------------------------
Regarding the skins, I think Cologne Blue *could* become the standard with some design fixes, but we should stick with Standard for now.
Considering that previewontop was recently changed to be the default, there remain two strikingly popular options: rememberpassword=1 and underline=0. Since most users never change their preferences, these numbers are quite high, even if they are not the majority.
I therefore think it would make sense to make these options defaults, that is, to make links non-underlined by default even for anonymous users, and to remember passwords by default.
Underlining:
Users who like their links underlined can still turn on this option, but extrapolating from the above, I would guess that non-underlined links are more popular. Note that we are a very link-heavy page, so the high amount of underlining on a page can get quite distracting. Links are reasonably easy to distinguish from normal text when non-underlined.
Remember password:
This option needs to be distinguished from underlining, as it can also be accessed on the login screen, not just on the preferences screen, and is thus likely to be noticed by more people. However, I still think this should be the default. There are users at places where they do not want their password remembered, such as cafes and changing terminals at work. What is the standard case and what the exception, though? My guess is that most people log in to Wikipedia from one or two machines, and that the browser on that machine is reasonably secure from access by others. Other users should be security aware enough to tick off the "Remember" checkbox during login.
Thoughts?
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
We should try to find the most reasonable default user options possible. Here's some data from the English Wikipedia (11474 users) on the number of users who have changed each option from the default:
skin=1 (nostalgia): 403 skin=2 (cologne): 991
Which means most useres uses the default? or is there another group with "skin=0" ?
I think you have the sql-queries at you fingertips: can you give me the stats (for the skins only) for german wikipedia, or the queries?
Smurf
Smurf-
We should try to find the most reasonable default user options possible. Here's some data from the English Wikipedia (11474 users) on the number of users who have changed each option from the default:
skin=1 (nostalgia): 403 skin=2 (cologne): 991
Which means most useres uses the default? or is there another group with "skin=0" ?
skin=0 is the default, and the remaining users (of the ~11500 total) use that one.
I think you have the sql-queries at you fingertips: can you give me the stats (for the skins only) for german wikipedia, or the queries?
select count(*) from user where user_options like "%optionname=1%"
Do this for any option you want to check, and substitute optionname and 1 or 0 depending on what you want to know. Let me know if the results are substantially different.
And I wish more people would use editondblclick. It's cool! ;-)
Regards,
Erik
Erik Moeller wrote:
skin=1 (nostalgia): 403 skin=2 (cologne): 991
German : 0: 1233 1: 50 2: 304
Is there a posibility to include a "last_login" (user_touched, I think) in that query (touched last 3 or 5 month), to exclude inactive users? A field user_created not exists, as far as I know. I'm not fit enought to do so, and experimental sql-queries on the live DB I'm not willing to do. My test-system is unfortunaly not reachable form work.
Smurf
Thomas Corell wrote:
Is there a posibility to include a "last_login" (user_touched, I think) in that query (touched last 3 or 5 month), to exclude inactive users? A field user_created not exists, as far as I know. I'm not fit enought to do so, and experimental sql-queries on the live DB I'm not willing to do. My test-system is unfortunaly not reachable form work.
or possibly better: nummer of changed pages of the users > 5 or so
Smurf
Je Vendredo 23 Majo 2003 00:57, Erik Moeller skribis:
Underlining:
We should just get rid of this option and not specify anything about underlining in our style sheet. Every browser has an option to set this, and people turn underlining off in the site just because we override their browser settings.
Remember password:
This should absolutely *not* *not* *not* be on by default.
Other users should be security aware enough to tick off the "Remember" checkbox during login.
I might wish the same, but I don't believe it. :)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion-
I thought you were going to bed :-)
Underlining:
We should just get rid of this option and not specify anything about underlining in our style sheet. Every browser has an option to set this, and people turn underlining off in the site just because we override their browser settings.
Most people are not even aware of this browser setting, and even if they are, it is useful to be able to set it on a per-site basis, for the following reasons:
1) If a site sets the link color, but not the link style, that means the browser setting is not overridden (at least in Mozi). So if a site decides to use black underlined text for its links, this would then become black non-underlined text. This is one reason to have this option turned on in general, but for specific sites/themes, a user may wish to turn it off. I for one would be very displeased if I would have to turn off underlining for all websites just to view Wikipedia in non-underlined text.
2) Our site is a particularly link-intensive one. The main page alone includes 127 links. Underlined text is ugly and hard on the eyes (which is why it is almost never used in print), but with just a few links, easy to locate on the page. It is quite obvious that the higher the link/text ratio, the bigger the negative impact of underlined links. Most users who surf with the default setting (the vast majority) will probably prefer surfing Wikipedia without underlined links.
Of the options in preferences, "underline" is the one which our users disable most often ("rememberpassword" doesn't count because it's also on a different screen). I think it would be a good idea to change the default.
Regards,
Erik
"Erik Moeller" skribis:
Underlining:
We should just get rid of this option and not specify anything about underlining in our style sheet. Every browser has an option to set this, and people turn underlining off in the site just because we override their browser settings.
Most people are not even aware of this browser setting, and even if they are, it is useful to be able to set it on a per-site basis, for the following reasons:
What about these three options?
( ) underline links ( ) use browser default ( ) not underline links
Which one to be the default is another question.
Paul
Paul Ebermann wrote:
What about these three options? ( ) underline links ( ) use browser default ( ) not underline links Which one to be the default is another question.
If my worry about colourblind readers does turn out to be reasonable, then we should make "use browser default" the default, since hopefully a lot of people that like nude links will already have set their browser defaults that way. (Not Erik, however.)
-- Toby
On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 05:20:22PM -0700, Toby Bartels wrote:
Paul Ebermann wrote:
What about these three options? ( ) underline links ( ) use browser default ( ) not underline links Which one to be the default is another question.
If my worry about colourblind readers does turn out to be reasonable, then we should make "use browser default" the default, since hopefully a lot of people that like nude links will already have set their browser defaults that way. (Not Erik, however.)
Stop that ! There is no such thing as browser defaults.
And anyway, colorblind people should be able to tell the difference between black and non-black on computer screen quite easily.
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Stop that ! There is no such thing as browser defaults.
I can tell my browser whether to underline links or not. CSS overrides this (unless I tell me browser not to let it).
And anyway, colorblind people should be able to tell the difference between black and non-black on computer screen quite easily.
OK, that sounds fair.
-- Toby
(Tomasz Wegrzanowski taw@users.sourceforge.net):
What about these three options? ( ) underline links ( ) use browser default ( ) not underline links Which one to be the default is another question.
If my worry about colourblind readers does turn out to be reasonable, then we should make "use browser default" the default, since hopefully a lot of people that like nude links will already have set their browser defaults that way. (Not Erik, however.)
Stop that ! There is no such thing as browser defaults.
And anyway, colorblind people should be able to tell the difference between black and non-black on computer screen quite easily.
I don't know what the hell Taw is thinking: of course there are browser defaults, and of course that's the right thing to do in many cases, because people can and do configure their browsers the way they like. That doesn't mean we can't make some other setting /our/ default, but using the browsers default should certainly be an option.
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 09:57:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
Thoughts?
skin = Cologne Blue (current standard is too ugly) underline = off remember password = off (security must be our absolute priority) default recent changes size = much bigger than now
SQL: select count(user_options)as Number, user_options from user group by user_options order by diff desc LIMIT 20
shows the top twenty of the mosed used configs. Possibly you need more than top twenty on english wikipedia to get a propper result.
On german DB (that's what I can access) this shows that 382 has changed rememberpassword=0 and 167 changed to rememberpassword=1, and thats the only change they made, the rest is at default.
Smurf
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 09:57:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
Thoughts?
skin = Cologne Blue (current standard is too ugly) underline = off remember password = off (security must be our absolute priority) default recent changes size = much bigger than now
I like underlining links: 1) I see the difference between "[[foo]] [[bar]]" and "[[foo bar]]". 2) I see typos like this: "[[foo ]] bar"
Smurf
On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 05:41:32PM +0200, Thomas Corell wrote:
Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
On Fri, May 23, 2003 at 09:57:00AM +0200, Erik Moeller wrote:
Thoughts?
skin = Cologne Blue (current standard is too ugly) underline = off remember password = off (security must be our absolute priority) default recent changes size = much bigger than now
I like underlining links:
- I see the difference between "[[foo]] [[bar]]" and "[[foo bar]]".
- I see typos like this: "[[foo ]] bar"
You can see that by moving mouse over link anyway. And of course nobody's going to take away your right to see links, we just want more sensible defaults.
Erik Moeller wrote:
Users who like their links underlined can still turn on this option, but extrapolating from the above, I would guess that non-underlined links are more popular. Note that we are a very link-heavy page, so the high amount of underlining on a page can get quite distracting. Links are reasonably easy to distinguish from normal text when non-underlined.
I worry about accessibility to colourblind users (specifically, new anonymous readers that don't know about the preferences page). I don't know enough about the matter to know if this worry is reasonable; if not, then I'll agree with you.
This option needs to be distinguished from underlining, as it can also be accessed on the login screen, not just on the preferences screen, and is thus likely to be noticed by more people. However, I still think this should be the default. There are users at places where they do not want their password remembered, such as cafes and changing terminals at work. What is the standard case and what the exception, though? My guess is that most people log in to Wikipedia from one or two machines, and that the browser on that machine is reasonably secure from access by others. Other users should be security aware enough to tick off the "Remember" checkbox during login.
For purposes of security, I don't think that we should change the default. If we change the underlining of links, then presumably this would become the one preference not set by default to the majority preference. As such, we ought to give people extra opportunity to change it -- which we already do, having a checkbox for that on the login page. So I think that it's all OK now.
-- Toby
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