[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Michael Peel]

Where did they fail? Did they fail to find a red link to create an  
article? (those seem to be getting increasingly rare) Could they not  
find a subject to start a new article on? Were they unable to type  
text into the appropriate box and submit it? Were they unable to  
structure the article well enough? Were they unable to wikify it?  
Were they unable to categorize it? Did they fail to add an infobox or  
a picture? Were they unable to get it to GA/FA status?

There's lots of failure points; which ones caused the problems, and  
are there simple tweaks that can be made to sort out the problems?

Mike

On 2 Dec 2008, at 13:23, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> 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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