[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Michael Peel]

Gerard,

You seem to have completely missed my point. At which stage in the  
process did they fail?

It's like answering the question "why do cars crash?" with "they  
failed to not crash."...

No, I don't have experience with small projects. That comment was  
based on my experience with en.wp, where red links seem to have gone  
out of fashion (and not because they're unnecessary).

Mike

On 2 Dec 2008, at 15:00, Gerard Meijssen wrote:

> 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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