On 9/19/06, Kirill Lokshin kirill.lokshin@gmail.com wrote:
On 9/18/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I speak as a long-time Wikipedian who is more interested in content than pretty presentation. I had a hand in helping develop the early versions of taxoboxes, and descriptive boxes for battles. To some extent the use of charts and tables is essential for organizing data. But when we reach a point that changing the content of these charts and boxes is a mysterious process for the average user, or when it is only with great difficulty that one even finds what page to edit, then we have to consider the possibility that we have gotten away from the essential principal that this is an encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
When we speak of Wikipedia as a site that anyone can edit that means more to me than permission. That permission is hollow if a person lacks the techniques to do it. In the earliest time we took pride in the fact that wiki-markup was so simple that anyone could understand it; the essentials could be put on a single page that did not even need to be scrolled. Someone could edit without having to learn html. Can we still honestly say that a retired professor in the arts and humanities is still able to contribute from his vast experience? His familiarity with his subject may be unquestionable, but his expertise preceeded the cyber-age and did not depend on familiarity with computer languages.
I strongly disagree. Our goal here must fundamentally be to produce an encyclopedia for the reader rather than merely to engage in the perpetual process of editing it.
There's no reason this has to be mutually exclusive since #2 helps #1. I'll explain in a bit. But you must admit editing has become quite complex.
1. We used to use CamelCase syntax for linking to BobNey 2. Then it became [[Bob Ney]] with free links 3. Add a template like {{current}} 4. Then add an infobox like {{Infobox Congressman | name=Robert William Ney | image name=Bob Ney.jpg 5. Then add inline references like <ref>[http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/001532.php DOJ press release on Ney's plea]</ref> 6. Add some tables, images, categories, etc.
I used to be a programmer/coder, so I'm not scared of funky code and symbols. But even my eyes glaze over when I need to decipher a taxobox, an inline reference or a table. Unless I'm really determined, I avoid editing it.
Even for doing images, it's way too hard. That's not good.
For those not at Wikimania hacking days, there were two presentations relevant to this issue of "user experience" while editing.
1) One was a presentation from OpenUsability which provided a good evaluation of user testing on editing Wikipedia pages. http://www.openusability.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=950
We needed a good friend to tell us - images and commons are way too hard for the average person to decipher. Licenses confusing, too many steps, what the hell is Commons, is my login the same? The presentation was received warmly - the developers in the room all know this is a big problem with putting in images.
2) WIKIWYG and parsing. Certainly a next logical step for WP is WYSIWYG editing, or at least the option of it. Some people like the power of markup, but for newbies graphical (ie. MS Word) editing would be more inclusive. For that you need markup->WYSIWYG->markup conversion. Well one of the [[Google Summer of Code]] participants spent his summer trying to create a "parser" to do just that. He failed. And not for lack of smarts, but because everyone recognizes what a rats nest Wikimarkup syntax is, having morphed over the years haphazardly. Every developer in the room had compassion for the young chap who tried it, and everyone recognized how incredibly hard a problem this is.
So the prospect of that conversion is grim, at least right now, without a major breakthrough, or altering Wikimarkup syntax to be more "normal" and running a script to change all "n" million articles. Yikes.
Producing a high-quality encyclopedia necessarily means allowing a somewhat more sophisticated set of layout and content presentation tools than the retired professor may be willing to learn -- but this is only a problem insofar as the professor *needs* to learn those tools. Just as we do not expect all users to be equally capable of taking high-quality photographs, writing FAs, or any of a variety of other tasks, we should not expect that all users will be equally capable of working on complex issues of templatized design and layout.
Understandable attitude but disconcerting. Some view Wikimarkup the same way as a "tech literacy test" to act as a bozo filter. (See [[Literacy test]]) I'm not a fan of, "Keeping it hard keeps it elite."
The retired professor, in your example, is most likely here to contribute content rather than to play around with the aesthetics of little colored boxes; the overwhelming majority of his exposure to templates will be either simply including them -- but usually there's no shortage of volunteers to do this anyways -- or using them as black boxes for data, like so
I would contend that this "retired" professor even seeing the arcane boxes and such would be intimdated enough not to even dive into it. And I have first-hand knowledge of such a case.
When I visited the Wikimedia Foundation in Florida last month, the dean of a prominent US college contacted the office, and she said she was an enthusiastic fan of Wikipedia, and thought it was great. But she also said that it was darn intimidating to edit, when she saw all that Wikimarkup. She wanted to contribute to areas for which she is a published author! But Wikimarkup is too hard and intimidating.
So this was not a "retired" professor but a professor and dean, at the top of her game, with enthusiastic interest, who was intimidated.
There is absolutely no reason, in most cases, for said professor to concern himself with how {{Infobox Clown}} transforms the values he enters into a pretty table; if he's particularly interested in layout issues, he can always ask someone for help if he can't figure things out.
You should observe some user testing sometime to see exactly how people react to these situations. The frustration threshold for users is typically very low.
Forcing everyone else to abandon all the sophisticated presentation tools we've developed, meanwhile, will drastically decrease the quality of page layout in the encyclopedia, and won't help the professor in the least, as the nice "black box" template will either be replaced with a fragile table, or nothing at all -- neither of which is something he'll be particularly pleased to work with, I suspect.
It does not have to be mutualy exclusive. It's a hard problem, but they are not inherently at odds.
-Andrew (User:Fuzheado)