[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Marco Chiesa]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen a gmail.com>wrote:

> Hoi,
> Over the last weeks I have been rather active in promoting improved
> usability for the MediaWiki software. What really got me going was learning
> from a Wikimania presentation that a UNICEF usability study done in
> Tanzania
> showed that 100% of the test subjects were unable to create a new article.
> UNICEF has created extensions to improve on this, extensions that make a
> difference. The fact that our usability is poor does not only hurt what
> some
> call "minority languages". A professor in Austria I know, a veteran user of
> software, was also hard pressed to collaborate on a wiki.


Do you know the demographics of the test subjects, and what exactly is
intended with creating a new article? Is it just creating a new page or
creating a page with correct formatting, categories, etc.?

>
> Our usability hurts all our projects. It hurts our smaller projects because
> they do not have enough content and contributors. It hurts our big projects
> because it excludes large demographies from contributing leading to bias
> and
> hurting the NPOV of many articles. When we want to reach out, there is no
> easier way then by making our software usable.


The bigger projects started small, the pioneers helped the newbies
explaining things, new people arrived, and the projects grew. The smaller
projects don't thrive for a number of reasons, such as too few people
interested, competition with a larger project (this happens with some
regional languages, where often "native" speakers are equally native in
another bigger language), digital divide,.. Of course this can be a vicious
circle (being small does not motivate people to join, a pioneer can only do
so much but if there are no followers it gets hard)

>
> What I propose is that those projects who are interested in improving their
> usability ask the WMF to work with them on this. Given that usable software
> should be understood, and given that this is somewhat experimental in
> nature
> as well, it makes sense that project should localise the extensions first
> before they qualify for an implementation. NB the CreatePage extension has
> only eight messages.


I am convinced that the best way to learn to use MediaWiki is editing
Wikipedia, possibly a large one. Reading the help pages, asking the more
expert users, and so on. This helps forming the pioneers, the teachers. The
the teachers go to the small projects, and teach the newbies there. Looking
at how the source code of a page really is is much more helpful than reading
software documentation, at least for people that don't come from the
software world

>
>
> What I propose is to have many and frequent updates. We should learn from
> our experience and consequently move forward carefully but deliberately. It
> is not acceptable that so many of our projects are failing. The UNICEF
> studies explain why this is, the studies show how to improve on this. We
> just have to apply the lessons learned. We just have to show that we can
> apply the lessons learnt.
>

Maybe some project just fail because they're not that useful, that's
Darwinian selection. I agree that some project could make a big difference
(a language like swahili, to say one), and it's definitely unacceptable that
they struggle. Usability of the software is important, but I still don't
believe it will make a difference alone.

Cruccone