[WikiEN-l] I Need Some Help

[Andrew Gray]

On 10 July 2010 18:10, Marc Riddell <michaeldavid86 at comcast.net> wrote:
> I'm having trouble with the appearance of and, in some instances, gaining
> access to various links on the WP site. The same thing is happening on the
> Wiktionary site. This just started happening this morning. Every page I go
> to has very large type. And the WP globe, as well as the boxes underneath
> it, are superimposed over the entire page. I don't know where else to go
> with this problem. I tried getting to the various "Help" pages but the same
> thing happens. Not only is the appearance of the page a mess, but clicking
> on the various Links doesn't work. Any suggestions? This situation, in
> addition to making it very difficult to read a page, makes it impossible for
> me to edit any.

As said by others, it's probably a page-zoom issue:

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/training/windowsvista/webtext.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/enable/training/windowsvista/webzoom.aspx

(for IE - other browsers, look at View > Zoom or similar menus)

What's interesting here is that whilst it seems like a once-off
problem, this actually happens a lot. I've seen five or six versions
of this complaint via OTRS - a user has resized their font size or
default zoom for Wikipedia by accident, is worried, and wants to know
how to fix it.

Now, in every case I've been able to track down to the root cause, the
user has apparently (accidentally) set text size themselves; it's not
that we've reset it, so we can (probably) rule that out.

But why is it we get these issues? Three possibilities leap out at me:

a) it actually happens fairly randomly across all sites, but people
tend to come back to Wikipedia, so that while it may seem a once-off
problem on a site you only visit once, it seems systematic for us.

b) We're easily contactable, so people do write to us to ask about it
rather than just throwing up their hands over it - a perception bias
on my part

c) There's something about the *way* people use Wikipedia that leads to this.

I'm tending towards c) - page zoom can often be altered by things like
mouse-wheel scrolling, which you get a lot when moving through long
pages, of which we obviously have plenty. But I'd be interested if
anyone has any other explanations for the phenomenon, and if we ought
to feed this back to someone in the usability groups.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk