I want to talk about several separate issues. Some of those also fit some of the forums in the CZ forum, so I'll talk about them there. Most don't Issue A: WPs "bureaucracy" In WP, there are thousands of different templates and info boxes. Those affect readers in two ways: 1) They interfere with their reading and usually add no important information (i.e., they reiterate what is already written in the article, often making the reading harder). 2) They create an 'intimidation factor'. Where there are so many things you have to know before starting to write, you usually don't or, if you do, do not "stay" with the article -- they donate and vanish. This creates a situation where most authors are one-timers, leaving the process of "wikifying" to the regulars. (See http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowritescomments for a small research that shows that most articles are written by visitors, wikified by the regulars). In short: templates make reading harder, and intimidate newcomers. My suggestion here is: A. To eliminate all the WP 'style and content' template, as they relate to the WP bureaucracy. B. Eliminate all but a few generic templates, making those as short as possible and limiting them to articles with strong taxonomic requirements (e.g., plants or animals). C. Create our own templates which should be one-glance templates. E.g. a template that shows where a person/event is located on a time scale. Such templates should not be graphic, so as to give users some sense of location without having to read anything. Issue B: Footnotes and references In WP, and also here, those are very much in vogue, probably as part of the effort to show that WP (or CZ) is a credible source of information. The problem is that footnotes tend to hinder readability. I think we need to find a way to make notes less prominent (although I'm not sure exactly how). Issue C: Design and Interface Design The lack of an appropriate forum for that in the CZ forums is telling. Most of us are not really aware of such issues and tend to feel that they are not really important -- content is what matters and all that. Well, design matters, and interface design is a crucial factor. WPs design sucks. It's is built to serve the authors, contributors and sysops, not readers: The front page contains more than 200 links, which makes it virtually impossible to select anything. The graphic and interface design is a serious and continuing crime against good taste, and the logo... Well... The obvious counter argument is: if the design is so bad, how come WP is the #6 site on the web? That is, if it's all that bad and people still flock to WP, it shows that design doesn't matter. Alternately, it may show that WPs design isn't THAT bad. Well, neither are true. To start, we really cannot tell how many of the visits to WP are by Wikipedians. With some languages, this number is about 50 percent (i.e., about half the visitors are Wikipedians, not readers). I am guessing that with WP-en the number is lower, but not much lower. Second, if we glance at the WikiCharts (accesible from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics) we can see that only a small minority (14.5 percent) of the visitors come to Wikipedia via the front page. In addition of those 2,044,581 front page visitors, almost all (98.6 percent or 2,017,355) go right to the search, completely ignoring the front page. If you check specific content, you can see that the featured articles garnered just a modest percentage of the visitors. Of the six featured articles in November, one ranks 81 with 10,400 visitors, another ranks 25 with 16,800, a third ranks 301 with 4,800 visitors, and the other three are not even among the 1,000 most visited articles. All three do not measure up to more than half a percent of the total visitors. Most of the visitors to WP (about 85 percent) come from external searches where the WP article came up, and the small minority that does go to WPs front page, goes there almost always to search something. In other words, more than 95 percent of the visitors avoid the front page if they can. They do it because it doesn't work conceptually. To work, the front page must be designed based on a clear concept of what it is intended to achieve: is it a means to direct readers to what they want to read as quickly as possible? Is it a place where people should "hang out" and read content? Is it a means to get readers interested in content elsewhere in CZ? With articles, the problem is both simpler and more complex. It is obvious that the content must be served differently. Let's take an article like "Albert Einstein" for example. The simple rule of interfacing with humans is that more is less. Poor Albert has to suffer about 40 different categories, including some bizzar ones (Swiss vegetarians, Dynamicists, Social justice) which means that NONE of them is of any use. The opening paragraph of the article is 120 words long, divided (with my browser) into seven lines, with 23 links. Then follows a TOC of 30 items. Unless human changed very drastically in recent years, this describes an unreadable article. Nobody can read 17 words long lines, and suffer that many "distractors" and "intimidators" unless they simply have to, or unless they write it. I think those issues of readability and human interface design need to be addressed, because if we intend to avoid pornographic content, fancruft, TV and movie related articles, and being the ultimate source for all things Borat (WPs most popular articles) we have to supply content that is enjoyable to read (content-wise), served in a humanly acceptable form. Ori Redler |
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