[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Harald Krichel]

Ilario Valdelli schrieb:
> 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.
>   
Great.

Wikipedia is a software made by programmers for computer nerds, it is
far from being usable to normal people.
But the first two answers come from nerds who tell us that the software
isn't the problem.

Of course there is a problem with the sample, but with the sample of
wikipedia-users, which do not nearly represent our possible contributors
of content.


Harald Krichel