[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
They were requested to start a new article.. Nothing fancy.. an article with
a few lines of text. The car did not crash, it never got moving.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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

> 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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