[Foundation-l] Regarding the one million dollar usability grant and already extant but unused extensions

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Many organisations use MediaWiki, many organisations use all kinds of
extensions to make MediaWiki more usable. Extensions do not necessarily work
for stable releases. This is why extension testing is important for us all.
Extensions are used in many languages this is why internationalisation and
localisation is important to us all. The lack of usability affects all
current MediaWiki installations now, and it is for this reason that people
are looking for any and all improvements that make a difference.

I had a look at the Wikia work and I love it. It indeed makes a difference.
How can all this work be leveraged in a more inclusive way. Wikia has
invested in usability, so did UNICEF. Because of a lack of cooperation, of
sharing the benefits of Open Source do not materialise. With the Wikimedia
Foundation receiving much money, we will either find another separate
project or a more inclusive project.

By cooperating with the people who have been working on usability the return
on the investment can be improved. I urge everyone to cooperate because the
alternative is a big waste of effort and money. Too much money and effort
have already been wasted. I know that Wikia has been working on WYSIWYG but
given that they operate their own repository it is not clear if and how we
can cooperate.

This cooperation can extend to the testing of extensions, localisation and
internationalisation... You know, usability and cooperation is needed now.

Thanks,
      GerardM


2008/12/9 Angela <beesley at gmail.com>

> On Sun, Dec 7, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > 2008/12/7 Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>:
> >> Hoi,
> >> When so many people are turned off by syntax of any kind, it makes sense
> to
> >> prevent them to see such syntax. It should be there however for those
> who do
> >> not consider it a turn off.
> >
> > Yeah, that's where WYSIWYG gets tricky - the complicated bits can only
> > really be done in code, so what do you do when someone using the
> > WYSISYG interface tries to edit a page which includes complicated
> > bits? I'm sure it can be done, but not easily.
>
> Templates and complicated parts can easily be hidden. See
> <http://robotech.wikia.com/index.php?title=Sandbox&action=edit> for
> example to see what happens to the {{sandbox}} template. Wikia has
> been working on WYSIWYG for a long time now, and I hope the code that
> is available at
> http://trac.wikia-code.com/browser/wikia/branches/wysiwyg will be
> useful to Wikimedia in improving usability.
>
> Angela
>
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