[WikiEN-l] WYSIWTF

[David Gerard]

On 4 January 2011 19:56, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:

> The other
> reason is that our usability research has shown that collapsing
> elements can in fact increase initial newbie confusion as it becomes
> harder to make a direct match between the two representation modes
> (Ctrl+F for something you're trying to change no longer works).


Yeah. This is why usability testing is *not optional*. Programmers are
*regularly* surprised by what actual users do with their creations.

Wikipedia already has many productive contributors who are smart,
knowledgeable and clueful but basically can't work computers - but can
just about cope with wikitext. Imagine if we could get *eight times*
the contributor pool, the areas of human experience we could cover if
we got in people who were even worse with computers but knew about
things other people didn't.


> The team is currently focused on finalizing the new ResourceLoader,
> which will generally make our front-end code more manageable, as well
> as finishing up phase 2 of the article feedback pilot (the little
> rating widget showing up on some articles) and ironing out bugs in the
> new upload wizard. But as we start into 2011, I'm hopeful that we can
> come up with a good development and staging plan for immediate
> improvements to the editing interface, as well as a longer term
> re-architecting towards rich-text editing which ideally allows for
> incremental benefits to be deployed to WMF projects.


What are their thoughts on the Wikia WYSIWYG editor? I presume Wikia
did usability tests. I don't like the Wikia editor a lot (and find it
opaque), but I can cope with wikitext.


- d.