[WikiEN-l] I Need Some Help

[Benjamin Esham]

Andrew Gray wrote:

> Marc Riddell wrote:
> 
> > [possible page-zoom issues]
> 
> 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

To be fair, though... for how many websites are you in a position to see
such problems?  Do you deal with user complaints at Google, Facebook,
Yahoo!, and the New York Times as well?  Otherwise I would think this is a
clear case of selection bias: it's likely that people behave no differently
with Wikipedia than they do with any other website, it's just that we only
happen to hear about the Wikipedia issues.

> 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.

If page zooming is the issue, I don't think there's really anything we could
do about it.  This seems to me to be a pretty clear-cut case of users not
knowing what's going on; trying to disable zooming altogether for the
benefit of that small set of users would be antisocial.  The best we can do
is to educate users on why this is happening and how they can prevent it in
the future.

Cheers,
-- 
Benjamin D. Esham   |   bdesham at gmail.com
    Haurheghaud, ijh hehe einght aghsethe hjij haafhohuhede!