On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 11:47 AM, David Gerard <dger...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 5 June 2010 19:40, Aphaia <aph...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> What is the good reason usability team thought data from English >> Wikipedia visitors' behaviors and alone were enough to design for all >> other 200+ languages' readership? It looks me an obvious mistake in >> opposition of your statement. > > > Indeed. There appears to be *no* community or reader groundswell in > favour of hiding the interwiki links by default. > > Where are the fans? So far I see Aryeh in favour. Is there anyone > else? On foundation-l or the blog? > > If this is such a good idea, where are the voices in favour, outside > the Foundation staff?
To be fair, it's not like there's a real good mechanism for giving such opinions on discrete aspects of the skin (or anything else). I'd imagine about all there is besides listening to us whinge is clickthrough data (like reading tea leaves), the small usability studies, and the feedback from the Vector Beta. Let me repeat: On all of these questions that have been hotly debated this month: the logo, the search box, the other languages links, flaggedrevs.... we don't have a good way of figuring out what the users think. Hell, we don't even have a good way of figuring out what *we* think. Sue's right, Foundation-l is a tiny vocal minority and those of us commenting may or may not represent anyone other than ourselves. Same goes for the blog readers/commenters, who one expects may care more about Wikipedia than most of the casual readers out there. And I sure wouldn't presume to be able to magically synthesize the internet, read all of the comments about wikipedia out there, and give you an answer to such a (rhetorical?) question as "where are the voices in favour"? (and I do know enough about formal usability to know that usability studies can be more useful than they seem at first glance, but this problem of synthesizing widely held opinions & figuring out their relative weight is something all large communities & sites have). But even given all that, we all have valid opinions and points to make too. We have a tradition in this community of making decisions based on the quality of arguments made, not the sheer numbers of people involved in voting for one option or another, and I think to lose sight of that -- whether in usability or anything else -- would be bad. At the end of the day, I deeply respect the usability team for *trying new things*, even if we change it back later, and for trying to make good decisions with the arguments and data at hand. I see no bad faith here. Just a lively debate about what to do to make the best possible Wikipedia experience for everyone concerned, even when everyone concerned may use the site in wildly varying ways. -- phoebe _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l