[WikiEN-l] I Need Some Help

[Carcharoth]

I encountered something similar recently (in the sense that it was the
GUI playing up). I would load pages and would immediately be taken to
the bottom of the page and kind of bounce up and down there rapidly
(if you know what I mean). I think I traced it to my mouse having been
pressed up against something and a button being pressed down without
me realising it!

Of course, many things are screwy about keyboard shortcut designs.
Whose bright idea was it to put Ctl-X, Ctl-C and Ctl-V next to each
other on the keyboard? Press those in the wrong order, or slip and hit
the wrong key, and you can easily lose stuff!

Carcharoth

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 12:56 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
> 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
>
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