[Wikimedia-l] Monobook was optimised for editors, Vector is more balanced between readers and edtors

[WereSpielChequers]

When Vector was introduced the rationale was that "The monobook design is
very "utilitarian" and optimized for editor usage. It can however also be
cluttered, "busy", and confusing to readers. The Usability initiative is
trying to strike a balance between both
groups<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector#Did_I_ask_for_this.3F>"
. Judging by subsequent trends I think they succeeded.

Monobook is cluttered because it puts lots of editor options on the screen,
Vector is "cleaner" because it puts most of those in sub menus. Of course
there will be some experienced editors who quickly worked out where the
various options were and for whom the occasional extra click is minimal
overhead. But the theory and I suspect the reality is that a skin which set
out to be more balanced between the needs of editors and readers has done
precisely that, if you make editing options an extra click away then fewer
editors will discover them. Now in an ideal world we would have a new
editor experience that steadily introduced editors to additional options.
Hiding some away means that fewer new editors will find them, and in
general the more editors discover additional features and make use of them
the more they are likely to contribute.

Since Vector became the default our readership has grown faster than the
internet whilst editorship has broadly stabilised. More tellingly the most
dramatic drops have not been in the number of editors who start editing, or
who do 5 edits, we can probably account for that drop just by looking at
the impact of the edit filters. The big drops have been in the proportion
of new editors who do their 100th or 1000th edit. So it looks to me that
the people who introduced Vector did exactly what they intended, though of
course there are many other factors that affect both readership and
editorship. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, the better an encyclopaedia
Wikipedia is the more we should be thinking about how to get more people to
use it. But it would be interesting to see some stats on the relative
retention and upgrading of editors who use monobook and Vector. Ideally we
should get one language version of Wikipedia to test the two for a year,
set half of new accounts to Vector and half to Monobook and then after a
year compare the two groups of editors.

Regards

Jonathan

Message: 1
> Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2013 22:45:11 +0000
> From: David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Copyright infringement - The real elephant
>         in the  room
> Message-ID:
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> dcLhPqEF_axubTG9Cwy9Q-BcFg at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> On 21 November 2013 21:26, Matthew Flaschen <matthew.flaschen at gatech.edu>
> wrote:
> > On 11/21/2013 03:37 AM, WereSpielChequers wrote:
>
> >> To some extent this can be considered a success for Vector
> >> and the shift of our default from a skin optimised for editing to one
> >> optimised for reading. Of course if we want to increase editing levels
> we
> >> always have the option of defaulting new accounts to Monobook instead of
> >> Vector.
>
> > I don't really agree that Vector is less encouraging of edits.  I've been
> > using it for years, and don't feel it slows down my editing.
>
>
> Can't say I've noticed a problem either, and I switched to Vector when
> it was still in testing.
>
>
> - d.
>