[Foundation-l] Usability: Is our vocabulary SNAFU?

[geni]

2008/12/9 Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com>:
> About usability: I believe that one significant barrier for new Wikimedians
> is the jargon in the Wikimedia projects, mostly in discussions, but also in
> help pages:
> * Expressions from computer science: IP, bug, URL
> * Expressions from the Open Source movement: fork, stable version
> * Expressions from the net culture: imho, :D, lol, @ (directed to a person
> in a discussion)
> * For non native speakers of English: SNAFU, dude
>
> Jargon (sometimes specialist's language) cannot be totally avoided, and it
> is good for community cohesion. But it would be a good step towards
> usability thinking before using jargon: is it really necessary here, is it
> comprehensive to everybody, even if "help:glossary" mentions it?
>
> Ziko

Fortunately with the possible exceptions of IP and URL you don't
actually need any of those to edit wikipedia.

-- 
geni