[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
You do not create a new article by finding the "edit" button. The task all
these people failed at was creating a whole new article.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2008/12/2 Ilario Valdelli <valdelli at gmail.com>

> On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Gerard Meijssen
> <gerard.meijssen at 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.
> >
>
> The problem for usability is that sometime there is not a better
> selection of users to have a "real" sampling.
>
> Naturally if this sampling is formed by users with a poor or no
> knowledge of computers, probably they will not have problems with
> Wikipedia because they would not able to switch on a computer. The
> usability, in this case is the minor problem.
>
> Probably is better to know if they were not able to use the edit
> button because the edit button is not "usable" or if they were not
> able because they don't have seen an "edit" button in the past.
>
> Ilario
>
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