Thank you for the feedback Quim!
*Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation
M +1 415 609 4043 \\ @jaredzimmerman <http://loo.ms/g0>
On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 6:12 AM, Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Tuesday, July 15, 2014, Risker
<risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The one thing that comes to my mind is that all
the stuff at the right of
the screen is what might be called the "bottom matter" from articles.
Giving it primary place in an article, well above the majority of content
is...well, suboptimal.
For me it was instant love. It puts the article in its widest context,
inviting users to discover all what the Wikimedia community is offering
about that topic. I was even wondering why the categories are not there,
assuming that they will be in some form in the real prototype/beta.
It's at the bottom because it's really
not all that
important; links to other similar articles and other Wikimedia sites is
(I'm going to be honest here) fluff, not content
Depends on what you are looking for. Readers interested precisely in the
article at sight and not in its context will not even look at the right
column after the initial surprise. Just like any news readers go directly
to the news piece ignoring whatever else is around.
However, many (most?) users visit Wikipedia with a less precise motivation
and a wider curiosity about some topic. These are also the users less
likely to hit the bottom of an article, and less likely to know what & who
is behind every Wikipedia article.
- especially those massive
templates that take the place of proper categorization.
Cause and consequence, perhaps? Maybe those templates became massive as a
way to call the attention at the bottom of the page, where proper
categories become almost invisible to the non-trained eye. The prototype
shows them expanded but they could be minimized by default in the beta
version. If we go forth with this design, editors will find solutions to
adapt oversize templates to their new privileged position.
I'm sure Winter 1.0 can get this part right. While the previous Winter
features were evolutionary (and that was good), this one is a real
challenger, and this is good too.
PS: and yes, thank you very much for prototyping.
--
Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l