[Foundation-l] Vector, a year after

[Hydriz Wikipedia]

Well, I am very sure I joined Wikimedia due to the change in skin and liked the new skin as compared to Monobook.

Regards,Hydrizhttp://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hydriz




> From: erik at wikimedia.org
> Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2011 19:24:48 -0700
> To: foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
> Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Vector, a year after
> 
> 2011/3/31 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni at mail.huji.ac.il>:
> > The Vector skin, the main product of the Usability Initiative, was
> > deployed on Wikimedia projects in April 2010.
> >
> > Quoting usability.wikimedia.org: "The goal of this initiative is to
> > measurably increase the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors by
> > improving the underlying software on the basis of user behavioral
> > studies, thereby reducing barriers to public participation."
> >
> > In the year that passed since then, did anyone measure whether the
> > usability of Wikipedia for new contributors increased?
> 
> The usability initiative was accompanied by three qualitative studies:
> 
> http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Evaluation_Study
> http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability_and_Experience_Study
> http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Progress_Study
> 
> Our studies validated that the changes we made did indeed by and large
> have the intended effect of simplifying the experience of new users.
> With that said, the aggregate editing trends continue to be troubling.
> See, for example, this page for a comparison of active editors across
> languages:
> 
> http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm
> 
> .. and, of course, the editor trends study and the New Wikipedians
> numbers. But, these larger trends aren't purely technical trends --
> they're social trends as well, and it's entirely possible that no
> amount of technical improvement is going to even make a meaningful
> dent unless/until we also make progress on making Wikimedia projects
> more open and more welcoming.
> 
> We haven't deployed some of the last-stage features of the project
> yet. These include an in-editor outline of the article headings, a
> tabbed view of preview/edit, and a default collapsed view of
> templates. Making template collapsing work cleanly in all browsers and
> for all document operations turned out to be very hard (due to the
> wrangling required to make the browser's rich-text-editor behave
> essentially like a beefed-up code editor), so we may not ever add that
> feature to a wikitext editor (as opposed to a visual editor). The
> other two features are likely doable with some more effort, but we're
> prioritizing them against other improvements and the visual editor
> effort itself.
> 
> So, in sum, 1) our qualitative research has shown an improvement for
> new users, 2) the quantitative trends are troubling, and it's not
> demonstrable that we've made a difference either way in the larger
> trends (which aren't purely technical but also social trends), 3)
> there's still quite a bit of code that we may end up picking up again
> but that's not currently running on WMF projects. I'm happy that we've
> done Vector as a first step, but it's just that - a first step.
> 
> -- 
> Erik Möller
> Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
> 
> Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
> 
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