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

[Dennis During]

I am enormously skeptical that there is any realistic possibility of getting
anyone let alone unpaid volunteers to forego the use of abbreviations or
useful jargon.

OTOH (LOL), I believe that there are MediaWiki software extensions (which I
enjoy using at Wiktionary) that allow a window to pop up when a highlighted
word is clicked. Inmy expereine the content is from Wiktionary. Wiktionary
has all of the menioned terms and special characters defined (except for the
open-source movement terms) and would be a possible source for definitions.
(At present, it explicitly exclude terms that are solely WikiJargon from the
main dictionary and relegate them to an Appendix page. ) Alternatively
enwikt could be used as a source for a special-purpose glossary that served
as the target for the extension. FWIW.

On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 9:55 AM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com>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
>
> 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
> --
> Ziko van Dijk
> NL-Silvolde
>

-- 
Dennis C. During

But then arises the doubt, can the mind of man, which has, as I fully
believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest
animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions ? -- Charles Darwin