[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Lennart Guldbrandsson]

Hello,

I was recently at a conference for Swedish information specialists (yes, I
had a talk there). There I met a woman who taught at a university. The
subject: information architecture. They had groups of students improving the
websites of several well known Swedish companies and organisations. Now,
they were seeking new websites to improve. We talked about them getting to
work on Wikipedia (of course without any commitments or strings attached)
and will continue to see if this is a feasible project. I will update this
thread as soon as I know more, but we should try everything we can to make
the threshold of Wikipedia and MediaWiki as low as possible.

Best wishes,

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Guldbrandsson, chair of Wikimedia Sverige and press contact for
Swedish Wikipedia // ordförande för Wikimedia Sverige och presskontakt för
svenskspråkiga Wikipedia



2008/12/2 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>

> 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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