Wikipedia's getting a new look

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:User_experience_feedback/New_features

by shivam14 • 16 years ago

46 27 16 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

pclark• 16 years ago

it still blows my mind that they haven't implemented a more user friendly editor.

jacquesm4• 16 years ago

In the announcement say they've tried to make things easier for the users, but most of the entries listed there are actually for editors.

The FAQ entry linked ( http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/What%27s_new,_questions_... ) has a lot more info than the announcement, the primary entry there is:

Why are you making these changes?

Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation are written and edited by volunteers. When knowledgeable people cannot participate in editing Wikipedia because they find it too confusing or difficult to edit articles, it is a serious problem that undermines the potential quality, breadth and depth of the content that we can offer to you. In other words, even if you don't contribute content, the easier we can make it for knowledgeable people to join our projects, the more useful our resources become to you.

So it seems they're really focusing on making the editor user friendly.

They also say that this is only the beginning of a series of changes.

nailer5• 16 years ago

> In the announcement say they've tried to make things easier for the users, but most of the entries listed there are actually for editors.

Yes, they consider users to be potential contributors.

tom_rath• 16 years ago

It's the unfriendliness of the editor_s_ which has been the problem in my experience.

When someone goes through the trouble of creating a well-cited article only to have it deleted for being 'not notable', they're unlikely to bother again. If there's a Wikipedia issue to resolve, it's the deletionists and the strange environment which encourages their behaviour.

tokenadult3• 16 years ago

Out of curiosity, what kind of topics are you writing about when you submit well-cited articles that are later deleted?

neilk• 16 years ago

Hi there -- I work at the WMF on usability, but on a slightly different project.

The lead on WikiEditor (Trevor Parscal) just did a presentation at PARC. If you want to learn more about the tradeoffs you can watch that video.

http://www.parc.com/event/1108/how-wikimedia-is-scaling-open...

We know that it doesn't look that different, but there are several big reasons for that.

The grant for this project was time limited, and the low-hanging fruit about usability turned out to be a lot more about organization and cleaner design. A lot of people just couldn't even find the edit button.

In any case, despite looking more or less the same, there's a much, much better jQuery-based system under the hood now, and it's on a much better foundation for adding features. Years of cruft have been cleared out.

The User Experience team is now a permanent aspect of the WMF, so we can start thinking about longer term ideas. WYSIWYG might be one of them. Stay tuned. Or, check us out -- our process is very, very open, and anyone can voice their concerns.

http://usability.wikimedia.org/

FabriceTalbot• 16 years ago

I don't know, I'm pretty ok with the way the editor is now. Maybe I've just grown accustomed to it.

nailer5• 16 years ago

I still don't know, nor can be bothered working out various different unnecessary markup languages, and I program. God forbid anyone whose talents lie elsewhere tries to contribute.

elblanco2• 16 years ago

It's okay, most likely some overzealous editor will simply delete whatever that person contributes anyway. Contributing to Wikipedia as a non-editor is a massive waste of time since even minor submissions get killed quickly and quickly turn into massive fights over notoriety and content.

lukeqsee• 16 years ago

I've been using the beta now for about 5 months, and in my experience it's cosmetic. Those cosmetics definitely are an improvement in usability and looks.

IMHO, it's a small step, but in the right direction for sure.

niels_olson2• 16 years ago

and the direction of the total step is about 60 degrees off, leaving sqrt(3)/2 step in the right direction.

gjm11• 16 years ago

If your direction is 60 degrees off then the right-direction component is 1/2, not sqrt(3)/2. (You move sqrt(3)/2 in the perpendicular direction.)

Gormo• 16 years ago

I found the beta to be precisely the opposite: it improved a number of functional factors, but aesthetically, the design is a step backwards.

For example, the functional separation of the content tabs (article, discussion) from the tabs representing what you're doing with that content (read, edit, view history) is a good improvement. But the design used to implement that is terrible.

There's no boundary between the top of each tab and the space above it, making it difficult to recognize the tabs as a tab interface at all - it looks like loose text in the middle of some whitespace. And there's no design element that represents the hierarchy of content - the read, edit, and history tabs are now on the right side of the screen, but how would a new user know they are subordinate to the article and discussion respectively?

I think Wikipedia misstepped here. They should have gradually introduced each new design element and proven that it could fit successfully into the structure of the site before building further on the innovations. Releasing an entire top-down redesign all at once is going to create a lot of unnecessary disruption.

rradu• 16 years ago

Will they stop talking about it and do it already? I'm tired of hearing of this new look and not seeing it 100% live yet.

tokenadult3• 16 years ago

I can read mark-up languages (I have been using them for editing since well before the invention of HTML), so the barely changed editor seems fine by me, but I can well believe it is off-putting to most would-be Wikipedians. The best feature of the editor is preview mode, so I can get a reality check on whether I've edited correctly or not.

I tried out the new look in beta beginning more than a month ago. The most habit-changing change was the relocation of the search input field. But that just gets it closer to the industry standard of being in the upper right of the page, so I'm gradually getting used to that.

blahedo• 16 years ago

The problem here is it is absolutely not "more user friendly" to just automatically make things more WYSIWYG. When it is important to preserve content and structure rather than just presentation---as is nice in HTML generally but crucial on Wikipedia---you need to provide a tool that helps you do that, not just make it pretty.

I have a student who has just completed an honors project that demonstrated that if you give web novices a simple markup language and a non-WYSIWYG editor (but do give them a preview button) they confirm presentation but focus on content, which ultimately makes websites more usable and often prettier too. It won the ugrad research competition at SIGCHI this year, so I don't think she was out in left field on this.

So, short version: Wikipedia's making a big mistake here.

ZeroGravitas• 16 years ago

I don't think Wikipedia is making things more WYSIWYG, they're mostly just collapsing some data heavy sections until you click on them.

Wikipedia's getting a new look

Related Stories