G'day Steve,
On 5/21/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)wikia.com>
wrote:
Yeah, I am liking this idea. Essentially the idea
here it to move the
notification from the page where you read to the page where you have
attempted to edit but can't. In this way, when someone tries to edit,
they get a friendly explanation of how to join the community. But if
they are just trying to read, they don't have to see a notice that is
probably fairly useless and bewildering to them.
It's even more confusing now that I see there's a phrase about "or to stop
banned editors from editing". Is this such a common situation that it's
worth mentioning? People there to read about GWB really don't need to know
about the effect that a few recidivist prats occasionally have on our
community...
Indeed. There's a suggestion W3C made about ... oooh ... nine years
ago: "don't mention the mechanics". In practical terms, it means two
things:
a) Your readers don't care how things work, just that they work.
Don't give someone an explanation of how HTTP works when all they
want to do is follow a link to look at Pokémon screenshots.
b) Don't assume that your readers will follow certain procedures to
read your website. Don't say "click this anchor reference" when
you could just as easily say "follow this link". If you assumed
all your readers were Lynx users, and wrote "make this the active
link, then press the right arrow on your keyboard", you'd confuse
the heck out of anyone using Internet Explorer.
I think we need to be conscious of something like that on Wikipedia.
For example, in those damned {{test}} templates, people keep
re-inserting the words "or reverted" in the bog-standard "your test
worked, and has been removed". Why do editors making tests care about
the Wikipedia keyword "revert"? The template exists to reassure testers
that their changes did no lasting damage, and to invite them to kindly
stop making them, please.
Likewise, why should a person trying to read about Lyndon LaRouche[0]
need to know that that scurrilous bastard Adam Carr used his influence
with the Cabal to get the LaRouchites banned from editing LaRouche
articles[1]?
Our love for making new rules for each other to follow displays itself
in peculiar ways. Not only do we fill our Wikipedia lives with
unnecessary procedure, but we then go on to *boast* about it to
completely uninterested editors. "Look," we seem to be saying, "on
George W. Bush we have a mechanism to keep banned users from editing!
Isn't that great? Click this anchor reference to read about the
policies we followed when we banned his arse! How would you like to
stop studying for your high school essay and start reading about ArbCom?
If you want, you can click this other anchor reference. Whee!"
There's a region between "being transparent" and "confusing the heck
out
of our readers because we're so fond of little pastel boxes", and it's a
region we really need to be inhabiting.
[0] I've really got to stop using this fellow in all my examples.
Fortunately, nobody actually reads what I write, so probably
nobody's noticed the pattern yet.
[1] Hi, Peter! You're in good company!
--
Mark Gallagher
"What? I can't hear you, I've got a banana on my head!"
- Danger Mouse
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