[Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
Usability research done by UNICEF on MediaWiki, by English language people
in Tanzania had 100% of their test subjects failing to create a new article.
This research is repeatable, and it is easy to improve on this because
UNICEF created extensions that will be part of the initial research. The
Uniwiki extensions are being tested elsewhere and bugfixes to make it work
with the latest MediaWiki have been supplied.

People like myself positively HATE editing English language Wikipedia
because of all the crap that is considered "must have" like citations, info
boxes et al. Wikia has worked on software that separates the crap from the
text. This means that it will become a lot easier to edit Wikipedia text.

When the usability of MediaWiki is improved, people will be encouraged to
contribute to MediaWiki projects. It will be really hard to make the
convoluted policies of the different Wikipedias clear. Many policies exist
that on the face of it makes sense. However, when you combine them all, you
get a mess that prevents people from contributing. I recently declined to
write an en.wp article because I am hesitant because of all this.

Realistically, in order to make MediaWiki and Wikipedia more usable, there
are two aspects. There are technical aspects that will make it easy to
contribute and there are the community aspects. For the Stanton project to
do the technical aspects is a no brainer; obviously they will experiment
with all the technical bits and bobs and make a difference. To get some
traction on the community aspects, it takes a community that acknowledges
that cleanup is needed.

When both technical and community issues are addressed, many more people
will edit but be realistic, the biggest difference will be in the other
Wikipedias because that is where the growth still has to happen. This is in
turn dependent on the quality of the Internationalisation that is part of
the Stanton project and the Localisation that is done at Betawiki.
Thanks,
      GerardM

2009/1/10 emijrp <emijrp at gmail.com>

> Hi all;
>
> I would like to know how is going to be rated the success of this
> operation/project. Do you hope a big wave of new users? More edits per
> day? To improve the visits/edits ratio? What are your wishes and your
> realistic predictions?
>
> Regards,
> emijrp
>
> Naoko Komura escribió:
> > On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 3:19 PM, <mbimmler at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> >
> >> Erik/Naoko: does the Stanton grant include a condition for (external)
> >> specific program evaluation?
> >>
> >>
> >
> > Yes, we are required to submit a quarterly report to the Stanton
> Foundation
> > to inform the project progress and status which includes financial
> report.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > - Naoko
> >
>
>
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