[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
There are many people who have been struggling with poor usability of
MediaWiki inside and outside of the Wikimedia Foundation. When the people
from this university are interested in working on usability, they will find
many people who have half ready solutions. They will find that improving
usability is not easy because it is a truly international environment. They
will find many people and organisations that will gladly work together,
experiment and learn what works best.

It would be lovely to increase the group of people who concentrate on the
usability of our beloved software.
Thanks,
        GerardM

2008/12/2 Lennart Guldbrandsson <wikihannibal at gmail.com>

> 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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