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

[Thomas Dalton]

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?

We can try and improve the jargon to make it easier to guess what is
meant, but avoiding the jargon would make it take far too long to say
anything. Wikipedia: pages should avoid jargon as much as possible,
Talk: and Wikipedia_talk: pages (and those Wikipedia: pages that are
actually talk pages by another name) need the jargon and there isn't
much we can do about it.