Hello Gerard, I agree with you, making MediaWiki more usable for beginners is more and more a pressing problem of ours.
Ting Gerard Meijssen wrote: > Hoi, > Regularly I hear people say that Wikipedia is failing. When you then listen, > there are all kinds of good reasons why Wikipedia is failing. Quality is > low, issues with living persons, pov pushers a long litany of woes are all > grounds to predict the imminent demise of Wikipedia. While all these issues > may be grounds for concern, it is hardly indicative of failure. To me they > are indicative of a wildly successful project coping with everything that is > a consequence of success. I am of the opinion that most of our projects > would love to have the same problems, the same issues, the same success as > the few project that do well. > > For most of our projects a lack of content, a lack of community ensure that > the project is irrelevant. No growth, no interest is more killing then all > the woes that our big projects suffer from. At Wikimania 2008 a presentation > was given by developers from UNICEF who had done proper usability studies. > They found that 100% of their newbie testsubjects were not able to create a > new article. > > This is serious. This explains why so many of our projects fail. We do not > invite collaboration because people do not know how to. They do not know how > to EVEN when they are explicitly invited to create a new article as they > were in this research. > > At the Wikimedia Conference Nederland, Jan-Bart de Vreede indicated in his > speech that Kennisnet is interested in implementing the UNICEF extensions. > These extensions are now localisable in any language at Betawiki. At > ExtensionTesting, all the extensions have been tested against stable > releases. Bugs were identified and some bugs were fixed. As a consequence it > is likely that some more MediaWiki installations will benefit from research. > > It seems obvious to people who deal with small projects that usability is > one of the big issue when it comes to the moribunt status of our small > projects. The question I put to you, what are we going to do to first agree > that this is an issue and then to deal with this issue. Do we care that 80% > of our projects are failing? > Thanks, > GerardM > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > [email protected] > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
