Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
Big welcome messages full of links make people's eyes glaze over. That's not just William Allen Simpson, that's lots of people. They see the headline "Welcome" and a bunch of text and skim it, don't see anything immediately urgent or relevant to their needs, and figure it's kind of like an End User License Agreement or other big walls of text that are not really necessary to read right then, which is usually a reasonable assumption. It seems reasonable to mention and try to fix this user interface & New Editor Engagement issue. And this is related to the work that the Community folks, like Maryana Pinchuk and Steven Walling, are doing with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:UWTEST
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_A/B_testing
so those might be fruitful places for interested folks to collaborate on fixing this problem.
Heh, it would be great if some UI testing work could be devoted to find out how to improve the commons welcome message (or at least find their weaknesses).