On 4 December 2011 03:56, Tony Sidaway <tonysida...@gmail.com> wrote:
> http://daggle.com/closed-unfriendly-world-wikipedia-2853 > > Now whatever the merits of his case, this chap does have a point about > the unfriendliness of the environment. Well covered in The Signpost, in fact. But I came away thinking that there is a misconception behind the "complaint". Put it this way: who is the customer? That turns out to be a rhetorical question: the customer is the reader. If the customer was the writer, or the person who feels he/she should have a Wikipedia page about them, the tone of the complaint would be more justified. > It isn't so much that we've > gone out of our way to be unfriendly, but the tool we use to > interact--the wiki, in other words--isn't really very fit for the > purpose. > > Considering that Wikipedia is the "killer app" for wikis, the comment seems a bit off-beam. What we have done is to stress-test the wiki concept by making a wiki at least two orders of magnitude larger than would have been been thought reasonable in the year 2000. > Wikis are _supposed_ to invite contributions, but here we seem to have > built a big maze that only frustrates people who in good faith want to > help us to make it better. > > AGF is good, but the issue here is just as much whether the problems with the "learning curve" are correctly described in the article. My first thought in finding Deletion Review on enWP is to type site:en.wikipedia.org "deletion review" into Google. So the top hit is the talk page of [[WP:DRV]]. If I omit the quotes I get the same thing. Not all related searches are so helpful but if you put in site:en.wikipedia.org deletion then (today for me) hit number three is [[WP:AFD]] and the template to the right has a link to the deletion review page. OK, I happen to know that the way to search enWP is a Google custom search, not futz around navigating on the site. That's a generic procedure that is presumably quite accessible to technical people everywhere. I get frustrating experiences regularly, in searching the websites of financial institutions for the quite opposite reason: I expect to get almost instant results from using Google to search the site for keywords, and the design seems to think the world wants menu-driven plodding navigation from an overcrowded front page full of irrelevant stuff, images and things in tiny print. Maybe if the WMF paid enough it could get Wikipedia to look the same. Charles _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
