[Wikimedia-l] a compromise proposal for visual editor dogfooding

[Andrew Gray]

On 3 August 2013 18:50, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3 August 2013 18:46, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk> wrote:
>
>> I wonder sometimes if maintaining help/documentation pages would be a
>> sensible thing for WMF to have a (part?) time staffer working on, but
>> I guess this gets into the muddy area of "paying people for volunteer
>> tasks"
>
> The trouble is (1) there's ten years' volunteer effort in the old
> how-to pages, (2) the VE interface isn't even finished yet (I
> certainly hope it isn't, anyway) (3) to the extent the VE needs a
> manual, it's not a good interface.

Yes and no. *Wikipedia* needs an interface manual. The standard page
has twenty visible interface links, another sixteen or so in
collapsible sidebar sections, ten in the footer, however many language
links, and goodness knows what else from sitenotices or boxes on the
page itself.

The actual mechanism you use to edit is almost secondary to this
problem, but if you've gone back to a manual in order to find "so, how
do I do this", you're going to get really thrown if there's two
buttons where it says there's one, or if you don't get the wall of
weird text it's told you the editing page looks like... etc etc.

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