On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 3:48 PM, Aryeh Gregor <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell <[email protected]> wrote: >> Who cares if people click them a lot? The space they formally >> occupied is filled with nothing now. > > Interface clutter is not psychologically free. Empty space is better > than space filled with mostly-useless controls. Whether these > particular controls are worth it I don't know, but the general > principle of hiding seldom-used things is sound.
Mostly-useless is not the same as infrequent. I think that this is a critical error people make when trying to be data-driven. (I strongly support and promote data driven decision making, but also fear that it can be so frequently misused) For example, the stats show 14 million page views a day from blackberry. 14m is not frequent compared to 3.6billion. (0.0038 BB users per user), and yet that number represents an enormous number of people in _absolute terms_ whos ability to use Wikipedia may be degraded, disrupted, or completely inhibited right now. Likewise, I do not doubt that only "One in big_number" followed an interwiki link, but the fact that more people use the site doesn't remove the value received by the smaller group ... which, because of the size of the site, might still consist of a hundred thousand people. You can attempt a weighted cost comparison: Num_interwiki_users * Cost_of_hiding vs Everyone_else * Cost_of_clutter. But even that will inevitably lead to bad conclusions for some issues because the costs are usually not linear things: A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand, ... because a zillion tiny benefits can often never really offset a smaller number of big costs. Contention about applying linear costing to things with non-linear or outright incomparable values is why people get worked up when deaths get imported into a cost/benefit analysis. It is somewhat crude of me to compare killing someone with inhibiting their use of Wikipedia, but I think the same problem with cost/benefit analysis exists there— if only in a very reduced form. _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
