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

Delirium delirium at hackish.org
Tue Dec 9 18:33:17 UTC 2008


Ziko van Dijk wrote:
> 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
>   
On the English Wikipedia, and occasionally Commons, I'd put 
Wikipedia-policy acronyms above all those in both frequency of use and 
likelihood of confusing or putting off newbies.

-Mark




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