On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 12:23:02PM -0600, Daniel Cannon wrote:
What the usability study found, to my understanding, was that MediaWiki was not particularly newbie-friendly; that is, its usability among new users was low. That said, MediaWiki surely has a steeper learning curve than most webware; however, it has a large group of power users who have found the various "oddities" of the software that confuse new users to be quite useful in increasing their productivity. By analogy, the modality of vim often confuses the hell out of new users to that software, yet it has become a feature that experienced users simply could not live without. Vim is never going to do away with its modal editing to become more "user-friendly"; similarly, I do not favor the idea of sacrificing the expert usability of MediaWiki to make the software more friendly to new users. Such a change, I fear, would certainly do just that--confuse expert users and hinder their productivity with the software.
Huzzah!
What You See Is All You Get, indeed.
I personally would object to such a change, and I do not feel any change to be necessary; however, I'm more than willing to discuss and experiment with this and other options. If you could perchance provide some samples of this change, preferably on complex pages with multiple images, tables, and templates intermingled with text, that could certainly help to gauge the degree of my objection. I would, however, strongly caution against making large, breaking changes on the basis of this single usability study without considering the possible repercussions of such changes outside the context of the points addressed by the study.
On this front, my only comment is "test it on a Blackberry". :-)
Cheers, -- jra