[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Nikola Smolenski]

Gerard Meijssen wrote:
> It is hardly relevant what the demographics of the test group is. 100%
> failure in Tanzania, well educated people in Austria failing to get to grips
> with Wikipedia, we get people informing us about our perceived security
> problem. The reason why it is hardly relevant is because the same studies
> show that the changes implemented made a measurable difference. There is no
> point finding fault at this. Even when a different demographic would be less
> disastrously bad, there is a solution that is known to improve the odds of
> finding people collaborating on a MediaWiki installation.

Known to whom? I am testing the CreatePage extension on 
http://www.appropedia.org and I find it harder to use than the usual way 
of creating pages.

First I have to enter the page name and click on "Create Page" - OK, the 
usual.

But then I have to choose a layout. I have no idea what a layout is, 
what layout should I choose, nor how will the layout I choose look.

When I choose one at random, I get to the actual edit page. The only 
improvement I see here is that buttons above the edit field have textual 
description, which is something that, now that I see it, I find quite 
useful :) The form is several screens long which I find frightening, 
Save button is lost under the form, it is not obvious what a section is 
(of course, that is not obvious right now, but this doesn't help much), 
and there is no practical way to reorder the sections. To the right is a 
list of categories that, on a real Wikipedia, would be completely 
unusable (and by the way, Commons solved this  problem when uploading a 
picture in a much better way).

Keep it wiki, keep it simple. People love to share their knowledge, not 
to fill forms.