[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
They failed their task. Their task was to create a new article. There are
many people who fail at this.

When you state that "those seem to be getting increasingly rare", I wonder
if you have experience with small and starting projects. It is a recurring
theme and it is a major reason for the failure of projects. I completely
agree with you that there are many more pain points. The trick is to solve
the issues that are easy to solve first. From this we can progress to a next
issue.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2008/12/2 Michael Peel <email at mikepeel.net>

> 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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