[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Chad]

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 8:40 AM, Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net> wrote:

> 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
>
>
Exactly. It helps to know *what* is wrong before trying to set
about fixing it. Saying they couldn't get from A to Z isn't enough,
as (like you said) there's many places to stumble along the way.

If these are general usability issues with the core MediaWiki
(lack of titles for buttons, bad page layouts), then those need to
be fixed in the software, not via extensions to circumvent the
current process. If the process itself has problems, then either
the process needs changing or an extension can supplement
the usual way of doing things.

Bugs can be fixed, we just need to know exactly what the bugs
are :)

-Chad