[Wikipedia-l] Useability

[quiddity]

Florence Devouard wrote:
> quiddity wrote:
>> The last mention I can find now, is this:
>> https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7493#c45
...
>>
>> So, that's where it currently stands.
>
> unfortunate...


I should note that I was never involved in reminding/bugging either of
them about helping with this particular issue, and that bugzilla
thread looked quite confusing for everyone involved - so - possibly a
dev just needs to be re-convinced (by someone they respect) that this
would be a useful fix to devote energy to?



>> (possibly related,
>> http://wikimania2007.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:GP1 covered "a
>> redesign of the default website interface", does anyone know anything
>> more about this proposal? is it in active development?)
>
> I think it went nowhere. Much to my regret.
>
> Last year at Wikimania, we had both a workshop session where we
> discussed useability (this proceeding) and the session handled by
> Andrew, where we discussed again the rather poor useability of the
> website and poor welcome of newbies in some communities.
>
> If my memory is good, many agreed (for example) that templates are a
> disaster ;-) But it seems very little has been done in the past year to
> improve the situation. I think the special page has been improved though
>  (it was very messy, now nicely reorganized). Anythink else ?
>


The Modern skin is fairly recent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&useskin=modern
The only thing I could find out about it, is at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29&oldid=187646696#Modern_skin

but it has no Wikipedia globe logo, which I've grown quite attached to. :(

--

What we need, is a short note printed on napkins, and pinned on the
corkboards at Google, whispering that we need a new skin designed for
our site. They must have a /few/ people that understand clean UI and
knowledge structures, and have 20%time to fill... ^_^

Quiddity



Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
> I've always been bothered by the fact that the main page doesn't have
> a big search box in the middle of it

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Usability/Main_Page/Draft/Search_box_poll
for the last time it was seriously considered.
There are a few [[Wikipedia:Main Page alternatives]] that you can set
to be your own default mainpage, some of which include search boxes.

Quiddity