Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Michael Snow wrote: On 6/9/2010 12:12 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Michael Snow wrote: There have been a lot of red herrings brought up on all sides of that issue. Use of images in a context that is on-topic and educational is clearly one of those, although I would suggest that we can do better at supporting reader choice, because it's really the reader we should be putting in control of their own quest for information. I am bound to disagree on the last point there. Our mission is not to make choices or to enable choices by any party, in terms of what is available. We make things available, and they should *be* available. If people want to provide subsets of what we provide, that is their affair. It isn't any part of our mission. My point has nothing to do with making things unavailable. There are other ways of supporting reader choice. As for the pretense that it's possible to sidestep value decisions about making or enabling choices, just by adopting availability as a default, that's simply wrong. The present situation involving interlanguage links is a perfect illustration of that. Regardless of which interface approach we adopted, the links were going to remain available, there was no thought that they would be deleted or that feature eliminated. The question is how they are going to be available, at what point we are going to present the reader with the choice, and what mechanisms will be used to enable those choices. Those are crucial questions to confront in our work, and they apply to much more than just interlanguage links, important as those are. You are precisely accurate in terms of the reason why people are so offended by the collapsing of interlanguage links, is just because that is against our mission. And that is just a minor way of going against our mission. I would suggest nobody even encompass going more directly against that mission. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Michael Snow wrote: There have been a lot of red herrings brought up on all sides of that issue. Use of images in a context that is on-topic and educational is clearly one of those, although I would suggest that we can do better at supporting reader choice, because it's really the reader we should be putting in control of their own quest for information. I am bound to disagree on the last point there. Our mission is not to make choices or to enable choices by any party, in terms of what is available. We make things available, and they should *be* available. If people want to provide subsets of what we provide, that is their affair. It isn't any part of our mission. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hoi, The WMF has as its strategy to invest in what has the highest impact. Given limited resources that makes sense. It also means that while philosophically as volunteers we do not have to make such choices, the WMF will and does. It is obvious that depending on your point of view, the choices made by the WMF can be fortunate or less so. You are right that it is not in our mission to make choices, but reality is different. The question is what choices to make and what their likely impact is. This brings you to two competing fundamentals; what has the most effect and what is the period to measure those effects. Thanks, GerardM On 9 June 2010 09:12, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: Michael Snow wrote: There have been a lot of red herrings brought up on all sides of that issue. Use of images in a context that is on-topic and educational is clearly one of those, although I would suggest that we can do better at supporting reader choice, because it's really the reader we should be putting in control of their own quest for information. I am bound to disagree on the last point there. Our mission is not to make choices or to enable choices by any party, in terms of what is available. We make things available, and they should *be* available. If people want to provide subsets of what we provide, that is their affair. It isn't any part of our mission. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 6/9/2010 12:12 AM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Michael Snow wrote: There have been a lot of red herrings brought up on all sides of that issue. Use of images in a context that is on-topic and educational is clearly one of those, although I would suggest that we can do better at supporting reader choice, because it's really the reader we should be putting in control of their own quest for information. I am bound to disagree on the last point there. Our mission is not to make choices or to enable choices by any party, in terms of what is available. We make things available, and they should *be* available. If people want to provide subsets of what we provide, that is their affair. It isn't any part of our mission. My point has nothing to do with making things unavailable. There are other ways of supporting reader choice. As for the pretense that it's possible to sidestep value decisions about making or enabling choices, just by adopting availability as a default, that's simply wrong. The present situation involving interlanguage links is a perfect illustration of that. Regardless of which interface approach we adopted, the links were going to remain available, there was no thought that they would be deleted or that feature eliminated. The question is how they are going to be available, at what point we are going to present the reader with the choice, and what mechanisms will be used to enable those choices. Those are crucial questions to confront in our work, and they apply to much more than just interlanguage links, important as those are. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
phoebe ayers wrote: I adore the word pellucid. But Gerard is right: simply put we can't and don't do everything. We don't make every piece of information available to every single person in the world -- yet. I do admit that many actors in the wikimedia universe have been forced to retreat into more comfortable positions to defend, the front line contributors are quite happy to fight the good fight, and total informational availability. You or no specific contributor need not be in the front line, but I do say to every body in the front line, personally I am shoulder to shoulder with you. Back to back. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
2010/6/2 Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com 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. (Taking English as example) Problem is, for most readers with a first language other than English, English Wikipedia is now annoying and slightly less useful. someone coming from Google might find English Wikipedia (due to enormous pagerank) but really want to read in her own language; the collapsing may make them to simply close the window, and try the next result. Might seem too dramatic, but this happens in practice. If one wants to talk about usability, it's important to keep track the most impaired users, because they have more urgent needs. (Yeah, people with little English skills are actually in a disadvantageous position on wiki-en: there are few multilingual clues at the first spot, and then the see in the language I prefer section is now behind an unnecessary Languages) [ BTW, I liked that universal signs idea of some poster I lost track here. I just think it doesn't really apply to the language list (that should be fully expanded), but rather to Discussion, Edit, etc Some universal symbols: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_symbol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Symbol_of_Access http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_international_common_standards If those (and others) were properly used on Wikipedia menus, it would be more accessible to people with poor English skills. ] -- Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva tolkiend...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
--- El dom 6-jun-10, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net escribió: I always think I don't have the page in my watchlist!!! Now, that's a reason to complain (Lynch the usability team!) I trust that at least the last part of this was meant as a joke, but I think it's worth a comment anyway. Michael, that was really off-topic, unnecessary, and a complete waste of bytes. When you write something sarcastically, the social connotations have zero relevance. I was ridiculing the excess of violence in the thread, that leads to nothing constructive. But then, perhaps the level of aggressiveness has reached a point where obvious sarcasm is taken literally? MarianoC.- PS: And to be fair; taking the lynching thing as a sensitive issue in USA is badly US centric; the term is used worldwide and in hundreds of languages, and has no necessary connection with black people. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 6/6/2010 9:03 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen wrote: Michael Snow wrote: Similarly, we know that the community population skews young and male. That has important consequences, and some of those unfortunately reinforce our lack of diversity. It's been pointed out what a male-centric approach we sometimes have, in the enthusiasm and manner with which certain subjects are covered, and the oblivious attitude toward potential offensiveness of various images. This comes across to all too many women as a hostile culture. Most large online communities do not have the kind of gender imbalance we have. This is a serious issue we need to address. The foundation could do targeted outreach forever to recruit underrepresented groups (whether it's ethnicity, age, gender, or other factors), and it would accomplish very little without significant improvements in our culture. Well, yes and no. Historically the first time the offensiveness of images on wikipedia first came to a head (so to speak), was the images on [[Clitoris]]. At least in that instance the contributors who feigned the images as being offensive to viewers -- while in many cases claiming *they* personally weren't at all offended (!!) -- were predominantly male. My recollection was/is that the defenders of a photographic image on that page, instead of a schematic drawing, were mostly female. There have been a lot of red herrings brought up on all sides of that issue. Use of images in a context that is on-topic and educational is clearly one of those, although I would suggest that we can do better at supporting reader choice, because it's really the reader we should be putting in control of their own quest for information. I don't deny the general point about the testosterone-laden atmosphere in some areas of our community, but I do want to note that even in the latest controversy over images, the person on the Board of Trustees who came strongest in defense of a unfettered retention of sensual images of educational value was its (single?) female member. It would be a serious mistake to claim that she was doing so only to fit in with the lads. (I assume you mean Kat, but she is not the only female board member.) I'm certainly not suggesting that. Sometimes it's easier to strongly argue positions that are counterintuitive to the role people might expect of you, because people are unlikely to suggest your convictions are skewed by your personal characteristics. I also think the focus on simple retention or deletion is almost a red herring sometimes, despite the conduct of another board member which basically framed the debate that way. The board's initial statement about educational images is kind of stuck there too, but we've been working on something a little more nuanced to come soon. In the meantime, I would encourage people to look at the discussion that's been happening on the Commons village pump regarding educational image use more generally. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Andreas Kolbe wrote: I used the interwiki links all the time in this manner at work, and still do. It was one of the things that turned me on to Wikipedia and caused me to start contributing, and eventually to register an account. As others have said, if the interwiki links had not been visible by default, I likely would not have discovered the feature, or discovered it only much later. An interesting thing is that even if the interwiki articles were poor, or incomplete, there was usually enough context provided to pick out the key terms in the field in the relevant languages, providing a starting point for further research and confirmation in and outside of Wikipedia. Extremely useful. There is another way in which the interwiki links are useful. We need to remember that an article in one language is often developed without reference to the corresponding article in a different language. They are written quite independently from each other, and thus can give different perspectives on the same subject, or highlight different aspects of the same subject. In a controversial topic the differences could be startling. Given the availability of translations that are just a click away, not even a native English speaker has to fear that clicking on an interwiki link will produce an unintelligible page. There could even be value to a double list which gives the option of viewing the other language article in its original form or in its machine translation. Ec ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 7 June 2010 08:42, Ray Saintonge sainto...@telus.net wrote: Given the availability of translations that are just a click away, not even a native English speaker has to fear that clicking on an interwiki link will produce an unintelligible page. There could even be value to a double list which gives the option of viewing the other language article in its original form or in its machine translation. There is a piece of user js which was implemented on en which does this, incidentally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Manishearth/Scripts#Wikipedia_interwiki_translator - it turns, eg, Espanol into Spanish (t), with the (t) link going to a Google translate link for the target page. I haven't used it much, but it's a useful tool to have. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
--- On Mon, 7/6/10, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: There is a piece of user js which was implemented on en which does this, incidentally: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Manishearth/Scripts#Wikipedia_interwiki_translator - it turns, eg, Espanol into Spanish (t), with the (t) link going to a Google translate link for the target page. I haven't used it much, but it's a useful tool to have. If you surf in Google Chrome, you get a bar on every foreign-language page asking you if you want to have the page (google-)translated into your language; one click then does the job. A. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Andrew Garrett agarr...@... writes: I will say to be fair that the best response to what you perceive as a poor design choice in somebody else's code is not to revert them and say There, I fixed it for you. Thank me later., but perhaps to discuss it with them first and find a compromise. There's an imperative to listen and respond to community feedback, but quietly changing somebody else's code against their explicit wishes is not a good way to make your point. This is true. In that sense, I do feel that the revert itself was justified for the exact reasons you state, but that the message sent by the revert summary was harsh and authoritarian, as I said. Reverting that change with a gentler and more helpful summary, or even just leaving it in for some time while a compromise is being worked on (the latter should not be done as a rule, of course, to discourage the point-making by disruption you speak of), would've been a better course of action. Roan Kattouw (Catrope) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Andrew Garrett wrote: I will say to be fair that the best response to what you perceive as a poor design choice in somebody else's code is not to revert them and say There, I fixed it for you. Thank me later., but perhaps to discuss it with them first and find a compromise. There's an imperative to listen and respond to community feedback, but quietly changing somebody else's code against their explicit wishes is not a good way to make your point. Have you looked at r67281? That was not a revert. Given the phrase collapse all navs but the first it changed it to collapse all navs but the first or the interwiki one. That was a bug fix, you might even call it fine tuning collapsiblenavs. And it was not *me* considering it a bug. It was backed up by the community. I wasn't trying to make a point, just trying to finally fix it and stop the mourning. I wasn't too successful :) However, it wasn't against their explicit wishes, since they hadn't expressed their wishes. Had they wontfixed bug 23497, I wouldn't have done that. Or expressed that in the bug, or this thread... It's worth noting the lack of feedback from the team here. There were a couple of replies by Howie after the fact, but other than those, the only coding staff replies were from Roan and you, which incidentally come both from the community. It was later revealed that Trevor had been on vacation for the last 2 weeks. That can partly explain the silence. I didn't know it. Although that could be taken a reason /for/ changing the code, too. We are editing each other code all the time. Extensions are more individual than eg. core, but still a one-line patch shouldn't be an issue. It was even stated later: Anyone is welcome to touch usability code, I think the problem was that it was that it was against their wishes, which I should have somehow guessed from being non-responsive. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: If you don't know the history of racial issues in the US, you might not realize just how serious a subject lynching is. In that cultural context, it is not something to be joked about. Your post is a brilliant example of agressive disrespect of other cultures where lynching is merely a verb which means execution by mob (I think if you told someone in Russia that lyniching is an offensive verb, he would most probably belive you said something silly). Bear in mind that only 0.55 % of the world population are sensitive about lyncing. --vvv ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
--- On Mon, 6/7/10, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: From: Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Monday, June 7, 2010, 8:55 AM On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: If you don't know the history of racial issues in the US, you might not realize just how serious a subject lynching is. In that cultural context, it is not something to be joked about. Your post is a brilliant example of agressive disrespect of other cultures where lynching is merely a verb which means execution by mob (I think if you told someone in Russia that lyniching is an offensive verb, he would most probably belive you said something silly). Bear in mind that only 0.55 % of the world population are sensitive about lyncing. That post can only being seen as an example of agressive disrespect of other cultures by people who think happening to be born in the USA is an agressive disrespect of other cultures. Americans are people too! Birgitte SB ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Birgitte SB birgitte...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Mon, 6/7/10, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: From: Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Monday, June 7, 2010, 8:55 AM On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: If you don't know the history of racial issues in the US, you might not realize just how serious a subject lynching is. In that cultural context, it is not something to be joked about. Your post is a brilliant example of agressive disrespect of other cultures where lynching is merely a verb which means execution by mob (I think if you told someone in Russia that lyniching is an offensive verb, he would most probably belive you said something silly). Bear in mind that only 0.55 % of the world population are sensitive about lyncing. That post can only being seen as an example of agressive disrespect of other cultures by people who think happening to be born in the USA is an agressive disrespect of other cultures. Americans are people too! Birgitte SB This post can be seen as furthering an OT fork of this (otherwise productive) thread. Can everyone who wants to discuss the cultural sensitivities surrounding lynching please take it offlist? Thanks. -Chad ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
(not pointing to anyone specifically) could we please stop this side track now? I think everybody knows what the other person means, and it doesn't really matter after all... at least not to this discussion. Lodewijk 2010/6/7 Birgitte SB birgitte...@yahoo.com --- On Mon, 6/7/10, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: From: Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Monday, June 7, 2010, 8:55 AM On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: If you don't know the history of racial issues in the US, you might not realize just how serious a subject lynching is. In that cultural context, it is not something to be joked about. Your post is a brilliant example of agressive disrespect of other cultures where lynching is merely a verb which means execution by mob (I think if you told someone in Russia that lyniching is an offensive verb, he would most probably belive you said something silly). Bear in mind that only 0.55 % of the world population are sensitive about lyncing. That post can only being seen as an example of agressive disrespect of other cultures by people who think happening to be born in the USA is an agressive disrespect of other cultures. Americans are people too! Birgitte SB ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 9:03 PM, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonav...@gmail.com wrote: Michael Snow wrote: Similarly, we know that the community population skews young and male. That has important consequences, and some of those unfortunately reinforce our lack of diversity. It's been pointed out what a male-centric approach we sometimes have, in the enthusiasm and manner with which certain subjects are covered, and the oblivious attitude toward potential offensiveness of various images. This comes across to all too many women as a hostile culture. Most large online communities do not have the kind of gender imbalance we have. This is a serious issue we need to address. The foundation could do targeted outreach forever to recruit underrepresented groups (whether it's ethnicity, age, gender, or other factors), and it would accomplish very little without significant improvements in our culture. snip person on the Board of Trustees who came strongest in defense of a unfettered retention of sensual images of educational value was its (single?) female member. It Uh... much as I like Kat (and she's not the only female member, there's also Bishakha), singling out her view as representative of all women on the projects is, arguably, part of the problem. Are there so few women speaking up as part of the community discussion that this is really necessary? (One interesting exercise is to count the number of posts by women on this very list. Even controlling for pseudonyms and unknown variability, it's still around 1/10 or lower, a good number of which are from me. Many of the rest are from WMF staffers. Did you notice? I do, every time I post, and not just because I try to not excessively spam the list.) -- Phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Chad innocentkil...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 10:30 AM, Birgitte SB birgitte...@yahoo.com wrote: --- On Mon, 6/7/10, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: If you don't know the history of racial issues in the US, you might not realize just how serious a subject lynching is. In that cultural context, it is not something to be joked about. Your post is a brilliant example of agressive disrespect of other cultures where lynching is merely a verb which means execution by mob (I think if you told someone in Russia that lyniching is an offensive verb, he would most probably belive you said something silly). Bear in mind that only 0.55 % of the world population are sensitive about lyncing. That post can only being seen as an example of agressive disrespect of other cultures by people who think happening to be born in the USA is an agressive disrespect of other cultures. Americans are people too! Birgitte SB This post can be seen as furthering an OT fork of this (otherwise productive) thread. Can everyone who wants to discuss the cultural sensitivities surrounding lynching please take it offlist? Thanks. This post can be seen as the list administrator asking everyone to be cool, don't go looking for things to be offended by, and try to keep what's already an obscenely long thread on-topic. Thanks! Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Maybe we should discuss if the usability is more important than multilinguism (It's not!) in Wikimedia Projects. On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 2:10 AM, Elias Gabriel Amaral da Silva If one wants to talk about usability, it's important to keep track the most impaired users, because they have more urgent needs. (Yeah, people with little English skills are actually in a disadvantageous position on wiki-en: there are few multilingual clues at the first spot, and then the see in the language I prefer section is now behind an unnecessary Languages) BTW, I liked that universal signs idea of some poster I lost track here. I just think it doesn't really apply to the language list (that How it doesn't apply? See the examples: http://languageicon.org/examples.php should be fully expanded), but rather to Discussion, Edit, etc There is an uviversal edit button: http://universaleditbutton.org/ Some universal symbols: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_symbol... The language icon was inspired by those icons: Feed icon: http://www.mozilla.org/foundation/feed-icon-guidelines/ Share icon: www.openshareicons.com/ Geotag icon: http://www.geotagicons.com/ OPML icon: http://opmlicons.com/ I think it's a good idea to use an icon for language. -- Fajro ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 7 June 2010 14:55, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 5:42 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: If you don't know the history of racial issues in the US, you might not realize just how serious a subject lynching is. In that cultural context, it is not something to be joked about. Your post is a brilliant example of agressive disrespect of other cultures where lynching is merely a verb which means execution by mob (I think if you told someone in Russia that lyniching is an offensive verb, he would most probably belive you said something silly). Bear in mind that only 0.55 % of the world population are sensitive about lyncing. Michael's post, by claiming inflammatory content that was not actually present at all, is the sort of thing that someone would post attempting to derail a discussion. I don't think that was his intent, but he still should have known better. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 12:14 PM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote: Aryeh, I was under the (apparently mistaken?) impression that at Wikipedia, the community makes the decisions Not exactly. If the community actually made decisions, Wikipedia would be a direct democracy, and it's not. The community does have a large say in decisions, but it doesn't make them, in the end. Particularly not on technical issues, which have always been controlled by a much smaller group. On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 1:22 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: You're simultaneously arguing for evidence-based decisions and explanations, while also adding to the pile of anecdotal (or simply made-up) logic behind the decisions (my first guess...). Because evidence is a great thing, but judgment is necessary too. It would be nice if you could do everything strictly based on evidence, but real life isn't so simple. And you're doing it as someone with the ability to gather actual, hard data on interlanguage link usage, which adds a bit more annoyance. I have no more access to click data than you do. I only have commit access and toolserver root access, nothing else. As far as I'm aware, nobody has properly graphed interlanguage link occurrence on the English Wikipedia. The data I found querying non-redirects in the article namespace on the English Wikipedia is available here.[1] As you can see, 1774000 articles have 0 interlanguage links (53%). Looking at pages with 5 or fewer interlanguage links, it's 2948039 articles (88%). That doesn't weight by views. We care about people's ability to use an average page *that they actually visit*, not a page selected uniformly at random. Some kind of view or click data is needed. The links are placed in the sidebar, which generally has more than enough room to accommodate these links. The links are completely out of the way, but still accessible to the user. While there has been some jibber-jabber about the page layout being psychologically free, having a few links in the sidebar that don't overlap anything or get in the way of anything hardly seems like it's going to cause user claustrophobia. You can collect data from real usability studies, where people actually sit in a room, with eye-tracking to see how much time they waste looking at interface elements they aren't going to use. This is not practical to do for every single interface element. Instead, rules of thumb result from that kind of study, like reduce the number of interface elements. These may or may not be correct in any particular case, but they are not jibber-jabber. The default should be flipped. There is near-universal agreement on this point at this point, including from Erik Moeller. I expect this will happen on Monday. This might be a good idea. I think a solution that only showed some of the links might be even better (although maybe not), but I'm not strongly committed to the idea that hiding the interlanguage links entirely is better than showing them all, if those are the only two choices right now. On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 2:37 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: I'm not claiming that most users complain. I'm noting that there are _some_ complaints when there's anything remotely worth complaining about (and sometimes even when there seemingly isn't). Just because there are complaints about *many* problems, doesn't mean there are complaints about *all* problems. Some problems draw few to no complaints, by their nature. If every problem really did trigger complaints, we wouldn't need usability studies -- we could find all problems by just looking at complaints. This isn't the case. So yes, it's true that any substantial change to the interlanguage links' default behavior would have generated complaints, regardless of whether it was a good idea. This, however, does not automatically render said complaints invalid. No, but it means the complaints are only worth as much as the arguments they bring forth. If there were evidence that the longstanding configuration caused a problem addressed by the change, this likely would outweigh the complaints. There is no such evidence. There is ample evidence that when users are presented with more buttons to click, they take longer to find what they want and make more mistakes. We can apply this generality to specific cases without having to directly check it every time. In fact, we have to, what with our lack of infinite time and money. We frequently receive complaints from unregistered users lacking any meaningful degree of familiarity with the site. Complaints like I can't access the site or I can't figure out how to do X, not like I took half a second longer to find the interface element I was looking for than if there had been no interlanguage links. The latter isn't even observable by users themselves, only in usability studies. But it makes a difference, when you add it up. Before investigating
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 7 June 2010 16:52, Eugene Eric Kim ee...@blueoxen.com wrote: Good design isn't just about following the user path; it's also about guiding the users in a way that's appropriate to the mission of the work. This appears to sum up the problem with this change: the usability team focused on some ideal of usability, and ignored the fact that they switched off an important path which people used to freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. Was the Foundation mission statement expressly part of the usability initiative? Was the obvious conflict with the mission statement considered when the list was switched to collapsed by default? (That's a yes or no question, and I'd love to hear the answer.) - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Aryeh Gregor wrote: Because evidence is a great thing, but judgment is necessary too. It would be nice if you could do everything strictly based on evidence, but real life isn't so simple. Agreed. So why are you dismissing people's arguments on the basis that they stem from such judgement (while simultaneously passing similar judgement of your own)? You can't have it both ways. It's entirely reasonable to vigorously disagree with others' arguments, of course. But when the rationale is they are not backed by data, it's unreasonable to exempt the user experience team and yourself from this standard. Just because there are complaints about *many* problems, doesn't mean there are complaints about *all* problems. Some problems draw few to no complaints, by their nature. As previously noted, perceived clutter draws complaints. If every problem really did trigger complaints, we wouldn't need usability studies -- we could find all problems by just looking at complaints. This isn't the case. We've agreed that such comments mustn't be interpreted as representative samples, so the value of usability studies is clear. However, this particular problem was identified *not* through such a study (despite the fact that one was ongoing), but through speculation stemming from a general design principle of questionable applicability. There is ample evidence that when users are presented with more buttons to click, they take longer to find what they want and make more mistakes. In my observation, a list of twenty interlanguage links is perceived *not* as twenty separate links, but as one coherent list. It's instantly clear that most or all of the labels are written in a language foreign to the user, and little or no time is spent examining them individually. However, I'm not suggesting that my observation is sacrosanct; I welcome scientific data. We can apply this generality to specific cases without having to directly check it every time. Yes, but not when dealing with a materially different entity. We don't have the budget to run a usability study on every individual possible problem. Of course not. But for reasons explained throughout the discussion, many of us regard this feature as immensely important and feel that it should not be demoted in the absence of data indicating that the change is beneficial. Howie Fung has acknowledged that additional data is needed, and I applaud this response. David Levy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 11:14 AM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote: change it back if people complain loudly. It means someone who happens to be in charge of making the decision needs to make a judgment call, based on all the evidence they have available. Aryeh, I was under the (apparently mistaken?) impression that at Wikipedia, the community makes the decisions, something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mexico.Chis.EZLN.01.jpg I have seen a chorus of voices against this change, many have presented good, coherent arguments (despite your claim to the contrary). The community has spoken and continues speaking. m. ___ The counterargument goes along these lines 1) the complains are just because somethign is changed (the fact that this was used the other way if there weren't interwikis, adding them would cause complain proves it's really not an argument for or against something, and definitely it is not a way to argue removing them is the proper course of action 2) The interwikis were not really frequantly used, so removing them isn't that harmful (which is not an argument **for** removing it's an argument about situation now not being as bad as it could be) 3) decision was made by experts (usability team) and they know better than community about what a non-regular user needs. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
One thing that is undoubtedly good is that users now have the choice of displaying lists like the interwiki links, or not. The system seems to do a reasonable job remembering a user's preferences. Someone who prefers the interwiki links hidden can get them off his screen with a click. But the interwiki links should be there when a user first comes to the site. In particular as the single word Languages on the left does not make it immediately apparent that you can view an Arabic, Spanish or Hebrew article on the same topic you are currently looking up. This is a big part of what Wikipedia's mission is about. People in Europe and Asia are more likely to speak several WP languages than people in the US or UK. I would bet money that non-native English speakers, who represent a very substantial proportion of en:WP readers, make greater use of the interwiki links in en:WP than native speakers. Andreas --- On Sun, 6/6/10, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: From: Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Sunday, 6 June, 2010, 16:40 On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 4:21 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: At the English Wikipedia, this is not so. If we had a bike shed, there would be daily complaints about its color. I should say that *almost no* users complain about small things. A tiny group of committed users will complain about small things, but they're not the targets of the Usability Initiative, so their complaints are not relevant here, *except* insofar as they provide reasoning or evidence about what most users think. By contrast, complaints from occasional users are useful in usability discussions even if the users provide no reasoning, because the complaints are ipso facto evidence of a problem. (But if we have only anecdotal evidence of complaints from occasional users, of course, that needs to be treated with the same caution as any anecdotal evidence.) I've encountered many complaints about clutter at the English Wikipedia (pertaining to articles, our main page and other pages), but not one complaint that the interwiki links caused clutter. My first guess would be that people didn't complain about interwiki links' clutter because they've always been there. By the time you're comfortable enough with the site to complain, you just won't notice them. I'd guess that the complaints you see are when things *change*. Experienced users are prone to complain when things change, because they've gotten used to how things are. If we leave off the links for a year, then turn them back on, I predict we'd get complaints about clutter. However, assuming that the interwiki links benefit a relatively small percentage of users (still a non-negligible number in absolute terms), I've yet to see evidence that displaying them by default is problematic. Like David Gerard, I desire access to the data behind this decision. Then say exactly what evidence you desire. What test would you suggest to see whether hiding the links helped or harmed things? On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 1:30 AM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Said data indicated only that the interwiki links were used relatively infrequently. Apparently, there is absolutely no data suggesting that the full list's display posed a problem. Rather, this is a hunch based upon the application of a general design principle whose relevance has not been established. Aryeh Gregor: You cited the importance of data (and the systematic analysis thereof). In light of this explanation, what is your opinion now? Data is important. It's also not always possible to gather. When multiple things are competing for attention, you can make one or the other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more clicks. But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a good thing or a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually want, or are people being distracted from what they actually want? If we have more clicks on interlanguage links and less on other interface elements, is that good or bad? If we wanted to maximize clicks on interlanguage links, we could always put them above the article text, so you have to scroll through them to get to the article text . . . but that's obviously ridiculous. As Greg said above, data is important, but it can be hard to apply correctly. Sometimes you really have to use judgment. But we could still use more data -- for instance, why do people usually click interlanguage links? Do they usually understand the language they're reading the article in, or not? We could have a little multiple-choice question that pops up a small percentage of the time when people click
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Aryeh Gregor wrote: My first guess would be that people didn't complain about interwiki links' clutter because they've always been there. By the time you're comfortable enough with the site to complain, you just won't notice them. I'd guess that the complaints you see are when things *change*. Experienced users are prone to complain when things change, because they've gotten used to how things are. If we leave off the links for a year, then turn them back on, I predict we'd get complaints about clutter. Not to beat a dead horse, but You're simultaneously arguing for evidence-based decisions and explanations, while also adding to the pile of anecdotal (or simply made-up) logic behind the decisions (my first guess...). And you're doing it as someone with the ability to gather actual, hard data on interlanguage link usage, which adds a bit more annoyance. As far as I'm aware, nobody has properly graphed interlanguage link occurrence on the English Wikipedia. The data I found querying non-redirects in the article namespace on the English Wikipedia is available here.[1] As you can see, 1774000 articles have 0 interlanguage links (53%). Looking at pages with 5 or fewer interlanguage links, it's 2948039 articles (88%). You (or perhaps you, by proxy) are pushing this idea that hiding these links reduced clutter. The reality is that there wasn't much clutter to begin with, for a few reasons. There is a direct correlation between article length and the number of interlanguage links. For example, Barack Obama has 169 interlanguage links, but the article is enormous, so it's not generally noticeable. I could graph this correlation, but this post is more than enough investment from me for the day. The links are placed in the sidebar, which generally has more than enough room to accommodate these links. The links are completely out of the way, but still accessible to the user. While there has been some jibber-jabber about the page layout being psychologically free, having a few links in the sidebar that don't overlap anything or get in the way of anything hardly seems like it's going to cause user claustrophobia. When looking at the actual data, I don't see a clutter argument being very strong or well supported. There have been proposals put forth to hide any additional interlanguage links over 5, though in 88% of cases currently, that will have no impact at all. It may be a valid idea to implement in the future, though it also introduces a lot of issues about how you would select the five most prominent links. And, as always, you have to weight the cost of development time and resources against the benefit of improving a small percent of pages (12% on the English Wikipedia, likely much less on the other projects). The default should be flipped. There is near-universal agreement on this point at this point, including from Erik Moeller. I expect this will happen on Monday. And, for those curious, the article with 243 interlanguage links is True Jesus Church. MZMcBride [1] http://toolserver.org/~mzmcbride/count-langlinks.txt ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Regarding clutter and ease of finding the right language I believe it helps a lot if the user realizes that the languages are listed in their native form and are mostly in alphabetic order. What often causes difficulty for me is the fact that the languages are often in some strange order (e.g. ordered by their country code instead of the displayed text, cf. Bahasa Indonesia, which makes it harder to spot with a glance whether the article exists on my home wiki or not ). I would welcome the UX team's opinion on how to improve on the ordering and consistency of the links (e.g. where to put languages in different scripts in the order; would it be helpful if the user's suspected native tongue was offered more prominently by bolding it or putting it to the beginning of the list) without necessarily hiding the links. Could we use the technology used to guess the putative native tongue of our readers to offer them a chance to start the article in their native WP - possibly through Google Translator Toolkit, without sacrificing general usability and annoying our casual readers? Best regards, Bence Damokos ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Aryeh Gregor wrote: I should say that *almost no* users complain about small things. A tiny group of committed users will complain about small things, but they're not the targets of the Usability Initiative, so their complaints are not relevant here, *except* insofar as they provide reasoning or evidence about what most users think. I'm not claiming that most users complain. I'm noting that there are _some_ complaints when there's anything remotely worth complaining about (and sometimes even when there seemingly isn't). So yes, it's true that any substantial change to the interlanguage links' default behavior would have generated complaints, regardless of whether it was a good idea. This, however, does not automatically render said complaints invalid. If there were evidence that the longstanding configuration caused a problem addressed by the change, this likely would outweigh the complaints. There is no such evidence. By contrast, complaints from occasional users are useful in usability discussions even if the users provide no reasoning, because the complaints are ipso facto evidence of a problem. (But if we have only anecdotal evidence of complaints from occasional users, of course, that needs to be treated with the same caution as any anecdotal evidence.) Agreed. I don't assert that the anecdotal evidence proves that the change was detrimental. But we have *no* evidence (apart from speculation) that it was beneficial. My first guess would be that people didn't complain about interwiki links' clutter because they've always been there. Or maybe there simply wasn't a problem. By the time you're comfortable enough with the site to complain, you just won't notice them. We frequently receive complaints from unregistered users lacking any meaningful degree of familiarity with the site. I'd guess that the complaints you see are when things *change*. See above. Experienced users are prone to complain when things change, because they've gotten used to how things are. Even among experienced users, complaints don't arise only when something changes. In fact, people complain that design elements are stale and should undergo change for the sake of change. If we leave off the links for a year, then turn them back on, I predict we'd get complaints about clutter. You just explained why such a response is inevitable (and I agree). Then say exactly what evidence you desire. What test would you suggest to see whether hiding the links helped or harmed things? Before investigating potential solutions, there should be evidence of a problem. I disagree with the strategy of implementing a significant UI modification on a hunch and testing to see whether this helped or harmed things. I don't know the extent to which the study is ongoing, but it should include (or should have included) questions intended to assess the harm (or lack thereof) caused by the interlanguage links' default visibility. Until this is shown to be detrimental, the links' utility (which we know to be nonzero) is irrelevant. Additionally, Howie Fung has cited interlanguage link usage data as a major factor in the decision, and I find it very troubling that the team gathered such statistics exclusively from the English Wikipedia (given the intention to deploy a single setup across the board). It is not reasonable to assume that the links are used with comparable frequency at other Wikipedias (particularly the smaller ones, whose articles often contain less information). But even if we go with the 0.95% figure, I (and others) dispute the belief that this is negligible. It isn't clear whether this refers to users or clicks (as the explanation's wording conflicts in this respect), but let's assume that it refers to users. (If it refers to clicks, the percentage of users obviously is substantially higher.) At an organization like eBay or Rhapsody, a design element relied upon by ~1% of users could be considered expendable for the sake of a subjectively prettier layout. Conversely, at the Wikimedia projects, such a feature can be mission-critical. The application of a general design principle (without due consideration of atypical circumstances that might render it inapplicable) is not a sound approach. Data is important. It's also not always possible to gather. You cited the absence of further data as a reason to reject assertions stemming from speculation and anecdotal evidence. We now know that no attempt was made to gather the data needed to determine whether the change is beneficial (or even addresses an actual problem). When multiple things are competing for attention, you can make one or the other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more clicks. But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a good thing or a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually want, or are people being distracted from what they actually want? If we have more clicks on interlanguage
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: [...] Data is important. It's also not always possible to gather. When multiple things are competing for attention, you can make one or the other more prominent, and it will get correspondingly more clicks. But it's up to your judgment to assess whether that's a good thing or a bad thing: are more people finding what they actually want, or are people being distracted from what they actually want? If we have more clicks on interlanguage links and less on other interface elements, is that good or bad? If we wanted to maximize clicks on interlanguage links, we could always put them above the article text, so you have to scroll through them to get to the article text . . . but that's obviously ridiculous. As Greg said above, data is important, but it can be hard to apply correctly. Sometimes you really have to use judgment. But we could still use more data -- for instance, why do people usually click interlanguage links? Do they usually understand the language they're reading the article in, or not? We could have a little multiple-choice question that pops up a small percentage of the time when people click on an interlanguage link. My suspicion is that a long list is not ideal. Yes, people will see it for what it is and they'll be able to find their language easily enough if they look. But it's distracting, and it's not obvious without (in some cases) a lot of scrolling whether there's anything below it. If we could use some heuristic to pick a few languages to display, with a prominent More link at the bottom, I suspect that would be superior. But first we should gather data on click rates for the list fully expanded and unexpanded. Per-page click rates are important here -- many articles have no interlanguage links, so will obviously pull down the average click rate despite being unaffected by the change. What's the trend like as articles have more interlanguage links? How many more interlanguage clicks are there for articles in twenty languages as opposed to five? Can we plot that? For each wiki separately, for preference? All this data gathering takes manpower to do, of course. Maybe the usability team doesn't have the manpower. If so, does anyone qualified volunteer? If not, we have to make decisions without data -- and that doesn't automatically mean keep the status quo, nor change it back if people complain loudly. It means someone who happens to be in charge of making the decision needs to make a judgment call, based on all the evidence they have available. [...] But why base only the decision for interlanguage links on click data? A rough estimate would say that the Edit button is used by far less than 1% as well. (Not to speak of View history or the various fundraiser banners.) Yet, the original grant explicitly stated as a *goal* to ease the edit process. So there is not only evidence to consider, but also policy. We do want to emphasize: Everyone can edit!, so we put an Edit button up there, even if it might disturb someone's mind with clutter. Do we want to advertize: This article is available in 100+ languages!, so someone when reading another article without that long list will think about translating this article to his mother tongue? Or maybe just say: Awesome! Tim ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Chad innocentkil...@... writes: I'd like to touch on this one particular point. The community HAS spoken and clearly wants it back the way it was. A volunteer even did so [0] but was reverted [1] with the message that UI changes to Vector are off-limits without some sort of prior discussion and approval. This sits with me _very_ badly. I don't disagree (in principle) that changes to our user experience should be discussed and not implemented via fiat. But when you've got overwhelming consensus that this is the right course of action, reverting the change and declaring it off-limits to our committers is just wrong. Our volunteer developers do a pretty good job of judging and implementing community consensus, and saying that some things aren't negotiable sets a bad precedence. I completely agree with this. Although the people that made and executed this decision are my friends and coworkers, I increasingly feel the need to call them out on this particular action. We, the usability team, exist to improve the appearance and usability of the site, not to own or monopolize these topics. This revert, particularly the tone (and, to a lesser degree, the substance) of the revert summary, sends the message that we do in fact claim that monopoly; that any decision about usability goes through us; that our code is a sacred work that may only be touched with prior approval of a staff member, and that any mortal who dares violate these sacred commandments will experience the Wrath of the Immediate Revert. There is no doubt in my mind that all members of the usability team, as well as other people involved with our work, will reject these notions instantly upon reading them. I am convinced that every single one of them has the genuine desire to work with the community in mutual respect rather than to impose their views upon them. However, they have failed to be cooperative, having appeared rather authoritarian in both their actions and their (mostly unconscious) messaging. I am certain this was not their intention, but that doesn't mean it wasn't inappropriate. About the issue at hand: there seems to be an overwhelming consensus that the collapsing of the language links should be reverted, be it permanently or in anticipation of a different solution. The Foundation has been neglecting to do this for too long now. Unless someone stops me, I will reinstate Plationdes' revert and deploy it to the live site tomorrow morning (PDT). Roan Kattouw (Catrope) P.S.: Except for the last sentence, this post expresses my opinions as a community member, not as a contractor for the Foundation. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
I can't believe that with all the complains no one has yet brought up the fact that the 'watch' has been replaced by a star that turns blue instead of yellow. I always think I don't have the page in my watchlist!!! Now, that's a reason to complain (Lynch the usability team!) MarianoC.- --- El dom 6-jun-10, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com escribió: De: Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com Asunto: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 Para: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Fecha: domingo, 6 de junio de 2010, 17:40 On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 1:07 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: The original intent of the UX team, as I understand it, was to help readers find essential (frequently clicked) elements in the navigation more easily by collapsing less essential ones. This is wrong approach of reworking sidebar. To do it correctly, you have to prioritize existing things. Add icons to most important items and move them to the top (random article is far more popular than current events). Move toolbox to the bottom and, ensuring youself before that most users don't use it, hide it for anonymous users only. Move most probably used interwikis to the top (I'd volunteer for coding this if I was sure I had enough spare time this summer). Add language codes, they are much easier to understand and to look for in a long list than a language name in language itself. Add more icons, so things are distinguishable. Oh, and no wonder that IW links are used less in Vector than in Monobook. Monobook sidebar has clear division between blocks. Vector has some loosy line between them. Also, in Vector sidebar elements are on the grey background, so most people don't notice them. Honestly, the set of blue links on the grey background is one of the worst thing you may introduce to improve the usability of the sidebar. --vvv ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 12:22 PM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: (...) The default should be flipped. There is near-universal agreement on this point at this point, including from Erik Moeller. I expect this will happen on Monday. And, for those curious, the article with 243 interlanguage links is True Jesus Church. MZMcBride [1] http://toolserver.org/~mzmcbride/count-langlinks.txt Well, on eswiki we have since today expanded by default after some talk on our village pump, via MediaWiki:Vector.js Once again, if the powers-that-be don't help communities to implement their consensus, communities will find a workaround (we've seen this over and over in the WM world). This I believe will be the route taken by most large wikis in the long run should default not be changed. This is kind of sad since if that happens then the only wikis that will have collapsed by default will be those who benefit the most with interwikis... the smaller ones. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sun, Jun 6, 2010 at 5:40 PM, Victor Vasiliev vasi...@gmail.com wrote: Oh, and no wonder that IW links are used less in Vector than in Monobook. Monobook sidebar has clear division between blocks. Vector has some loosy line between them. Also, in Vector sidebar elements are on the grey background, so most people don't notice them. Honestly, the set of blue links on the grey background is one of the worst thing you may introduce to improve the usability of the sidebar. I totally agree. That's why I prefer Monobook. Well.. that and the stupid favorite/rate/bookmark star on the button watch. -- Fajro ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 6:23 AM, Roan Kattouw roan.katt...@gmail.com wrote: Chad innocentkil...@... writes: I'd like to touch on this one particular point. The community HAS spoken and clearly wants it back the way it was. A volunteer even did so [0] but was reverted [1] with the message that UI changes to Vector are off-limits without some sort of prior discussion and approval. This sits with me _very_ badly. I don't disagree (in principle) that changes to our user experience should be discussed and not implemented via fiat. But when you've got overwhelming consensus that this is the right course of action, reverting the change and declaring it off-limits to our committers is just wrong. Our volunteer developers do a pretty good job of judging and implementing community consensus, and saying that some things aren't negotiable sets a bad precedence. I completely agree with this. Although the people that made and executed this decision are my friends and coworkers, I increasingly feel the need to call them out on this particular action. We, the usability team, exist to improve the appearance and usability of the site, not to own or monopolize these topics. This revert, particularly the tone (and, to a lesser degree, the substance) of the revert summary, sends the message that we do in fact claim that monopoly; that any decision about usability goes through us; that our code is a sacred work that may only be touched with prior approval of a staff member, and that any mortal who dares violate these sacred commandments will experience the Wrath of the Immediate Revert. I will say to be fair that the best response to what you perceive as a poor design choice in somebody else's code is not to revert them and say There, I fixed it for you. Thank me later., but perhaps to discuss it with them first and find a compromise. There's an imperative to listen and respond to community feedback, but quietly changing somebody else's code against their explicit wishes is not a good way to make your point. -- Andrew Garrett http://werdn.us/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 6/6/2010 2:57 PM, Mariano Cecowski wrote: I can't believe that with all the complains no one has yet brought up the fact that the 'watch' has been replaced by a star that turns blue instead of yellow. I always think I don't have the page in my watchlist!!! Now, that's a reason to complain (Lynch the usability team!) I trust that at least the last part of this was meant as a joke, but I think it's worth a comment anyway. This is not so much related to usability or interlanguage links, but the larger issue some people have been highlighting about communication and culture. If you don't know the history of racial issues in the US, you might not realize just how serious a subject lynching is. In that cultural context, it is not something to be joked about. For African-Americans online, talk about lynching is arguably more offensive than violations of Godwin's law. For me, this highlights some of the issues that make our culture much more closed than it should be. I think we are often far too careless in the tone and language we use with each other. We need to both be more careful in how we communicate, and more forgiving of those who inadvertently make mistakes in this area. I'm happy to forgive a comment about lynching made in ignorance of its connotations. In this discussion, there's been quite a bit of consternation about the attitude of the usability team, which seems to have grown largely out of a comment attached to the debated piece of code. I imagine the author may well regret it, but I don't think it should be seized upon in isolation from the productive dialogue I've seen. An administrator on the wiki might be a bit grumpy in an edit summary, too - that's not a good thing particularly, but not necessarily worth indicting the entire community, as some critics try to do. It happens, people are human, hence both fallible and capable of improving. Because of the race aspect, this is also a good opening to talk about diversity and cultural awareness. As a community, we are overwhelmingly white (to use the racial constructs of the US; to express it another way, of European ancestry). We manage to have a smattering of Asian people, of various ethnic groups. But some groups are effectively not involved at all, and the European and American flavor is very dominant. Because of how that shapes our interactions, is it any wonder that black people might not feel welcome among us? We may be perfectly innocent, as exemplified here, yet our culture can appear hostile to people of African descent. Similarly, we know that the community population skews young and male. That has important consequences, and some of those unfortunately reinforce our lack of diversity. It's been pointed out what a male-centric approach we sometimes have, in the enthusiasm and manner with which certain subjects are covered, and the oblivious attitude toward potential offensiveness of various images. This comes across to all too many women as a hostile culture. Most large online communities do not have the kind of gender imbalance we have. This is a serious issue we need to address. The foundation could do targeted outreach forever to recruit underrepresented groups (whether it's ethnicity, age, gender, or other factors), and it would accomplish very little without significant improvements in our culture. --Michael Snow ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Michael Snow wrote: Similarly, we know that the community population skews young and male. That has important consequences, and some of those unfortunately reinforce our lack of diversity. It's been pointed out what a male-centric approach we sometimes have, in the enthusiasm and manner with which certain subjects are covered, and the oblivious attitude toward potential offensiveness of various images. This comes across to all too many women as a hostile culture. Most large online communities do not have the kind of gender imbalance we have. This is a serious issue we need to address. The foundation could do targeted outreach forever to recruit underrepresented groups (whether it's ethnicity, age, gender, or other factors), and it would accomplish very little without significant improvements in our culture. Well, yes and no. Historically the first time the offensiveness of images on wikipedia first came to a head (so to speak), was the images on [[Clitoris]]. At least in that instance the contributors who feigned the images as being offensive to viewers -- while in many cases claiming *they* personally weren't at all offended (!!) -- were predominantly male. My recollection was/is that the defenders of a photographic image on that page, instead of a schematic drawing, were mostly female. I don't deny the general point about the testosterone-laden atmosphere in some areas of our community, but I do want to note that even in the latest controversy over images, the person on the Board of Trustees who came strongest in defense of a unfettered retention of sensual images of educational value was its (single?) female member. It would be a serious mistake to claim that she was doing so only to fit in with the lads. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 5 June 2010 02:03, Howie Fung hf...@wikimedia.org wrote: The Usability team discussed this issue at length this afternoon. We listened closely to the feedback and have come up with solution which we hope will work for everyone. It's not a perfect solution, but we think it's a reasonable compromise. From your response it seems to me that the usability team looks at the iw-list as user interface. To me it is not primarily a user interface, it is information about the subject similar to e.g. the categories. By one glance at the list I can see that the theme has not been written about in many languages yet, or I can see that a huge number of languages have an article about the current theme. I can discover that a language, even one where I cannot read the letters, have found this theme important enough to write about it. Neither of these pieces of information require me to click on the links to be discovered, nor do they invite me to click any more than the edit links that are present at each section heading. (And the latter are pure user interface, no information). I have a feeling that the group of users that were observed were probably native english speakers using their native language Wikipedia, which by chance happens to be the largest in size. That is the Wikipedia that receives approximately 50% of the total visits. That leaves just under 50% for other languages. However, even part of the visits to the largest are from speakers of other languages. My interpretation of your data is thus that it comes from less than half the total numbers of users. A special half at that, especially when it comes to the iw-list. There are some suggestions that the geolocation could be used to customize this. To anyone with such ideas, I would just suggest first getting on a plane to a place with a script you dont understand, go to a internet cafe and attempt to make an advanced search using google. I would be surprised if you still felt it was a good idea. An important point about the iw-links is that they might be important to use as links just for a minority, but that to that minority they are of vital importance. Your compromise is not good enough for that minority. You might as well remove the edit links because just a minority of visitors to this site actually uses them. Hans A. Rosbach (User Haros with no as home wiki) ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Thirded. Waerth Or you could simply restore the one-line code modification that provided the default behavior requested by the community (pending evidence that an alternative setup is beneficial). Seconded. Just bring them back already. This is an imaginary problem you've come up with here. The community is pretty much literally begging for their return and I think we've offered a lot of very good arguments. Is this going to be the day that Wikipedia jumped the shark and users' opinions stopped counting? Please don't let it be. M. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 4 June 2010 21:21, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things. I've encountered many complaints about clutter at the English Wikipedia (pertaining to articles, our main page and other pages), but not one complaint that the interwiki links caused clutter. FWIW, the only time I've heard a complaint about the visual effect of the interwikis is where we have a very short article on an internationally popular topic, such as: http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa ...here, 90% of the page area is blank space, as the article has stopped but the interwikis keep on going, and it feels as though the page is a very weirdly laid-out way of referring people to different languages. (This is quite rare on enwiki these days because due to sheer numbers, it's unusual to find a topic covered in ten or more languages which is a mere stub on en. But there's still plenty of cases out there.) Interestingly, even with the full list of languages, the page above looks better in Vector than in Monobook: http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa?useskin=vector http://pdc.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaa?useskin=monobook - dropping the solid boxes from the left-hand column means that it doesn't look so dominant when expanded. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hi all, thank you for your summary, Guillaume. I would like to add to this a question based on Jon's insightful email: the research you did on clicks etc, was apparently only on the English Wikipedia. Would it be an option to first do more research on how the links are used on the other projects? Out of the 700 projects to choose from, you unfortunately picked one where the clicking is most likely to be very different from all the other projects. Usually that is not a good basis to build decisions for all 700 projects on. Besides that, it seems you measured logged in users (since you mention comparing monobook vs vector, it seems that you measured people who switched before the Big Switch?) Perhaps you want to actually do research on how anonymous users work. And to be honest, I find ~1% actually quite a *lot* for this kind of links. Considering the huge number of people who do not speak a language besides English, or who rather stay there because they started there for a reason (and why would you then go to the German article on Pocahontas if the English Wikipedia suits you well). Would it be an option to put the language links back to as they were for now, and then do some more research first on how people outside the English language behave, how anonymous users behave and have a discussion about that in the community first? Because I strongly believe this topic is *so* important to all the smaller languages (they draw their community from these links, after all), that we should involve that as well into the discussion. The links are not just there to help the specific visitors of the English Wikipedia, but they are there as well to help the tswana Wikipedia to develop over time to a serious size. Please remember that our mission is to bring the sum of human knowledge to *all* people in the whole world. Not just the readers of major languages. I do however recognize that linking the whole huge list might not be an optimal way of helping these communities, but I am not sure either that focusing on large and to the reader relevant languages will be. best regards, Lodewijk 2010/6/5 Guillaume Paumier guillom@gmail.com Howie, Thanks for your detailed message. I appreciate your efforts of trying to listen to the feedback from the community. However, even after listening to the discussion in the office today, and after reading your message, I still fail to understand the logic behind these decisions. I'm going to try and summarize your paragraphs into a few sentences; please tell me if I got something wrong In a paragraph, you explain it is your belief that in Monobook, the long list of languages made it difficult for the user to identify this area as a list of languages. In the following paragraph, you say you tracked the clicks in the sidebar in Monobook, and found that less than 1% of users clicked on a language link. You then explain you hid the list of languages because this number showed it wasn't used. Perhaps I'm just beating a dead horse, but, looking at these two arguments, a fairly reasonable hypothesis to make is that users don't click on the languages links *because* they don't realize it's there. A fairly reasonable design decision would be to try and make it more discoverable, and you could measure the impact easily by seeing if more users click on the language links. Instead, you chose to hide the list completely. I still fail to see how this decision could be an attempt at fixing the issue you had discovered. Maybe users don't think of a traffic jam as a list of cars. But showing an empty road hardly makes things better. -- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]] http://www.gpaumier.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 7:30 AM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Howie Fung wrote: While we did not explicitly test for this during our usability studies (e.g., it wasn't included as a major design question), we did exercise judgement in identifying this as a problem, based partly on the applying the above design principle to the site, partly on the data. Said data indicated only that the interwiki links were used relatively infrequently. Apparently, there is absolutely no data suggesting that the full list's display posed a problem. Rather, this is a hunch based upon the application of a general design principle whose relevance has not been established. I was searching for a way to exactly that, David, and you said it perfectly. A usability principle may be universally accepted, but I can't think of a single one that can be applied to absolutely every case. What's happening now is a vocal minority disputing the application of one principle to one specific case, and with very little disagreement—we just seem to differ on matters of degree. And yes, I'll echo others when I question the original rationale and suggest that the interpretation of what very little data was collected is completely wrong, but I think I'll direct my focus toward a practical fix, rather than just calling the usability team stupid. Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Austin Hair wrote: And yes, I'll echo others when I question the original rationale and suggest that the interpretation of what very little data was collected is completely wrong, but I think I'll direct my focus toward a practical fix, rather than just calling the usability team stupid. Your last sentence surprised me, as I haven't seen anyone opine that the usability team is stupid (and I certainly am not suggesting anything of the sort). Everyone makes mistakes, and we believe that one has been made in this instance. As for a practical fix, one actually was implemented (and quickly undone). David Levy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:47 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Austin Hair wrote: And yes, I'll echo others when I question the original rationale and suggest that the interpretation of what very little data was collected is completely wrong, but I think I'll direct my focus toward a practical fix, rather than just calling the usability team stupid. Your last sentence surprised me, as I haven't seen anyone opine that the usability team is stupid (and I certainly am not suggesting anything of the sort). Everyone makes mistakes, and we believe that one has been made in this instance. As for a practical fix, one actually was implemented (and quickly undone). Sorry if that wasn't clear—I didn't mean to indict you or anyone else for doing that; all I meant was that although I, personally, could easily focus on mistakes the usability team made, the way forward is to simply fix it to everyone's satisfaction. Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 13:19, Lodewijk lodew...@effeietsanders.org wrote: Hi all, thank you for your summary, Guillaume. I would like to add to this a question based on Jon's insightful email: the research you did on clicks etc, was apparently only on the English Wikipedia. Would it be an option to first do more research on how the links are used on the other projects? Out of the 700 projects to choose from, you unfortunately picked one where the clicking is most likely to be very different from all the other projects. Usually that is not a good basis to build decisions for all 700 projects on. Besides that, it seems you measured logged in users (since you mention comparing monobook vs vector, it seems that you measured people who switched before the Big Switch?) Perhaps you want to actually do research on how anonymous users work. There's a few other things that would be interesting: * comparing with country as well (to account for # languages people likely know, wether they're likely to be browsing their own language wikipedia) * effect of a long list of interwiki (altho you'd need to correct for wether there's likely a language they know well/better then the version they're currently reading) - I wonder if a long list makes it less likely for people to click on something * size of the article - do long articles interwikilinks get used less or not? henna ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 2:03 PM, susanpgard...@gmail.com wrote: Sorry for top-posting. Austin, think about who everyone is. The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers. The job of the user experience team is to try to balance all readers' needs, which is not easy, and will sometimes involve making decisions that not everyone agrees with. People here have given some useful input, but I think it's far from obvious that the user experience team has made a mistake.. (I'm not really intending to weigh in on this particular issue -- I'm speaking generally.) Sue, you appear to be making the assumption that the folks here are writing from a position of their personal preferences while the usability team is working on the behalf of the best interests of the project. I don't believe this comparison to be accurate. The interlanguage links can be easily unhidden by anyone who knows about them. The site remembers that you clicked to expand them. That memory is short, but it wouldn't take any real effort to override with personal settings... or people can disable Vector (which is what I've done, because Vector is slow, even though I like it a lot overall). In short, there is little reason for a sophisticated user to complain about this for their own benefit. I think the people here are speaking up for the sake of the readers, and for the sake of preserving the best of the existing design principles used on the site. I know I am. Non-agreement on personal preferences is an entirely different matter than non-agreement about how to best help our readers and how to best express the values and principles behind the operation of our sites. I was alarmed when I heard the click rates: 1%. That's an enormous number of clicks, considerably higher than I expected with the large number of things available for folks to click on. To hear that it went down considerably with Vector—well, if nothing else, it is a possible objective indication that the change has reduced the usability of the site. It is absolutely clear evidence that this change has made a material impact on how we express ourselves to the world. I think it's clear from my earlier messages, before I knew the actual number, that I would have regarded figures like this as evidence of a clear mistake. There is a clear attitude from the foundation staff that I, and others, are perceiving in these discussions. The notion that the community of contributors is a particularly whiny batch of customers who must be 'managed', that they express demands unconnected from the needs of the readers... and that it is more meaningful when a couple of office staff retreat to some meeting room and say we reached a decision. Sadly, this attitude appears to be the worst from the former volunteers on the staff—they are not afraid to speak up in community discussion, and feel a need to distinguish themselves from all the volunteers. This needs to stop and a point needs to be made clear: This community is who made the sites. I don't just mean the articles. I mean the user interfaces, the PR statements, the fundraiser material, _everything_. The success rates for companies trying to build large and popular websites is miserable. Every successful one is a fluke, and all the successful ones have a staff and budget orders of magnitude larger than yours. We have an existence proof that the community is able to manage the operation of the sites at a world class level. Certainly there are many things which could have been done better, more uniformly, more completely, or with better planning... but the community has a proven competence in virtually every area that the foundation is now attempting to be directly involved in. Not every member of the community, of course, but the aggregate. Wikimedia's ability to do these things is an unknown, but the (lack of) successes of other closed companies running websites—even ones staffed by brilliant people—suggests that it is most likely that you will also be unsuccessful. I don't mean this as a comment on the competence of anyone involved (as I know many of them to be rather fantastic people), it's just the most likely outcome. Imagine a resume for the community as a unit: * Expertise in every imaginable subject. * Simultaneous background in almost every human culture. * Speaks hundreds of languages. * Wrote the world's largest encyclopedia. * Built one of the world's most popular websites, from the ground up. * Managed to make an encyclopedia somehow interesting enough to be a popular website. * Managed the fundraising campaigns to support the entire operating cost of the above mentioned Top-N website on charitable contributions for many years. * On and on, etc. (Like all resumes, this does not highlight the negatives--just proclaims what it's been able to
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Gregory Maxwell wrote: I was alarmed when I heard the click rates: 1%. That's an enormous number of clicks, considerably higher than I expected with the large number of things available for folks to click on. To hear that it went down considerably with Vector—well, if nothing else, it is a possible objective indication that the change has reduced the usability of the site. To clarify, no current statistics have been released. The 0.28% figure refers to use of Vector before the official roll-out (when the interwiki links became collapsed by default, if I'm not mistaken). The disparity is attributable to the fact that most Vector users were participants in an opt-in, English-language beta test. For the record, I agree with everything else that you wrote. David Levy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
The original intent of the UX team, as I understand it, was to help readers find essential (frequently clicked) elements in the navigation more easily by collapsing less essential ones. It has been legitimately argued that the language links are essential for many users, even if the click rate is lower than that of some other elements, and that they are also key to surfacing our value of language diversity. The reasonable hypothesis has also been presented that the click rates are higher in other languages than English. The legitimate counterargument is that the naïve link list does not necessarily do the best job at this: by presenting the one or two links that may be relevant to the user within a potentially (and hopefully) very long column of foreign words in sometimes foreign scripts, it's a reasonable hypothesis that users will not in fact discover or understand the availability of -their- language, but rather simply glance over the list. Howie has presented the outlines of a new compromise approach: that by presenting a limited number of links by default, we increase the discoverability of the feature, while also limiting overall page clutter. That's also just a hypothesis. I would suggest the following approach: 1) That we return to the default-expanded state for now. If we want to default-collapse again, we'll need some more compelling metrics that demonstrate the actual benefits of doing so. 2) That we prototype the system above, or some variant thereof, define key metrics of success, and A/B test it against the existing one, provided the idea doesn't turn out to be obviously flawed. I agree that this isn't the highest priority issue on the list of UX fixes and changes, so by implementing 1), we can do 2) on a timeline that makes sense without a false urgency. The BlackBerry issue is indeed of greater importance. It only affects a subset of BB models, apparently older ones from what I've seen. Hampton, Tomasz and Ryan Lane have been working on getting VMs with the BB simulators set up, so that we can a) debug Vector on different BB versions, b) test the mobile redirect and mobile site on BB before we enable a redirect. This was delayed by ops issues on the mobile site, but I hope we'll get It sorted out next week. For the record, I agree entirely that read-breakage of this type is a critical, high priority bug. Erik On 6/5/10, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:37 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Sue Gardner wrote: Feedback is great, but it irritates me when people start using words like stupid -- that's what I was responding to. Perhaps you misread the context. Austin wrote the word stupid as a hypothetical example of nonconstructive commentary that should be avoided. No one has hurled an insult. Moreover feedback can itself be perceived as an insult. Imagine that someone cleaning your office took your important paperwork and dumped it in a bin. You complain— Hey we need that stuff to be accessible! and they retort Thank you for your _feedback_. We'll consider it during our future cleaning plans. We're not just providing feedback here. We're collectively making a decision, as we've always done, thank you very much. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- Sent from my mobile device Erik Möller Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: In short, there is little reason for a sophisticated user to complain about this for their own benefit. I think the people here are speaking up for the sake of the readers, and for the sake of preserving the best of the existing design principles used on the site. I know I am. I don't mean to detract from Greg's truly excellent e-mail by replying to just part of it, but I know that this is the case for me—I still use the Classic theme, restyled with my own CSS and Javascript, and all of the interwiki links are right where they were before. Vector doesn't affect me personally, but I see its impact on people around me all day. For the love of all that is virtuous, please at least read everything this man says. Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
The foundation's programmers have the technical power to define the experience of all aspects of the site however they please. They cannot be prevented from having this power, but they nonetheless must not use it, except for the most mundane details of day to day maintenance. Their role is to carry out the wishes of the community to the extent it is feasible. They will obviously need to figure out how to accommodate different and conflicting wishes, but it is not up to them to establish the priorities. This is true also of the specialists, such as the interface team: their role is to advise the community, not determine the results, and they should accept that their advice however excellent will nonetheless not always be followed. This is especially true for the specialists who do not have prior experience with WP, and can therefore not be expected to know the customs and way of thinking that prevails, and that sets the limits for what any individual can do by their own decision. Certainly they can be expected to learn it, but they must expect their understanding of it to be always corrected by the actual community. For example, they seem to have operated on the assumption that 1% use of a feature, or the use of an uncommon platform, is something that can be ignored. This may be a common assumption in many settings, including some I am quite familiar with, but it is not in WP. On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 5:10 PM, Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 10:00 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: In short, there is little reason for a sophisticated user to complain about this for their own benefit. I think the people here are speaking up for the sake of the readers, and for the sake of preserving the best of the existing design principles used on the site. I know I am. I don't mean to detract from Greg's truly excellent e-mail by replying to just part of it, but I know that this is the case for me—I still use the Classic theme, restyled with my own CSS and Javascript, and all of the interwiki links are right where they were before. Vector doesn't affect me personally, but I see its impact on people around me all day. For the love of all that is virtuous, please at least read everything this man says. Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 4:00 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: In this discussion we don't merely have personal preferences, we're arguing principles of design and hypothesizing benefit for the readers. And, excluding the foundation staff, we appear to have a broad, if not complete, consensus that the inter-language links should come back. In the community-operated model this would already be done by now. I'd like to echo Phoebe's +1,000,000 first of all. I agree with everything you've said. I'd like to touch on this one particular point. The community HAS spoken and clearly wants it back the way it was. A volunteer even did so [0] but was reverted [1] with the message that UI changes to Vector are off-limits without some sort of prior discussion and approval. This sits with me _very_ badly. I don't disagree (in principle) that changes to our user experience should be discussed and not implemented via fiat. But when you've got overwhelming consensus that this is the right course of action, reverting the change and declaring it off-limits to our committers is just wrong. Our volunteer developers do a pretty good job of judging and implementing community consensus, and saying that some things aren't negotiable sets a bad precedence. Of course I don't suggest we start a revert war in SVN over it, but I do think that Trevor's revert should be backed out and the full list restored until a better long term solution is thought out (per Erik's e-mail). -Chad [0] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/67281 [1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/67299 ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
I used the interwiki links all the time in this manner at work, and still do. It was one of the things that turned me on to Wikipedia and caused me to start contributing, and eventually to register an account. As others have said, if the interwiki links had not been visible by default, I likely would not have discovered the feature, or discovered it only much later. An interesting thing is that even if the interwiki articles were poor, or incomplete, there was usually enough context provided to pick out the key terms in the field in the relevant languages, providing a starting point for further research and confirmation in and outside of Wikipedia. Extremely useful. Even today the articles that are of the most practical benefit to me are very often C-Class or stubs. Andreas --- On Fri, 4/6/10, J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov alexandrdmitriroma...@gmail.com wrote: From: J Alexandr Ledbury-Romanov alexandrdmitriroma...@gmail.com Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2 To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Date: Friday, 4 June, 2010, 9:27 Me three for using the interwiki links as a way of finding the word or phrase I'm looking for in another language (along with Wiktionary). Not only do they assist me in finding translations of the words or phrases I am looking for, they also give me context and relevant material for languages I'm comfortable using. They are also particularly useful for languages where I am not at all comfortable (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic) where I get results with images of the subject that confirm that I have found the right noun I need. Sometimes I get false positives, but unlike with my various dictionaries which I now rarely use, I can usually figure out pretty quickly that I have not got the translation I need. I'd be interested to know what the default languages I would get based computer profiling. Geolocating would put in me in Morocco (official language Modern Standard Arabic, though French is commonly used), browser configuration would give French, and Wikimedia system user preferences are set in English, simply because I predominantly use the English Wikipedia and English Wikinews; I'm far too lazy to have to translate the Wikimedia terminology in my head when navigating in French, German or Russian. AD 2010/6/4 phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms). The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature. Of course not, I do this all the time (I even wrote about it), but I don't have any idea how many non-wikipedians use the interwiki links in this manner. On the list of research projects I wish someone would get around to: I would love to know more about unexpected/atypical uses of the projects like this... I guess the reference desk is a similar feature, an unexpected service cropping up in the middle of the encyclopedia. I wonder what others there are. -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 10:20 PM, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 5:48 AM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com 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. They are not mostly-useless controls; they are there because _building_ content _in every language_ is our mission. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects Missing interwikis are a valuable cue that a block is missing. Yes, this. The list of available languages is a key part of a page, not a navigation nicety. They used to be available at the top of an article by default, until that started taking up a few inches of screen space across the board. We could still use a small bit of text reading also in N other languages that is similarly prominent: above-the-fold, near the top of the page. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 6:46 PM, Samuel Klein meta...@gmail.com wrote: Yes, this. The list of available languages is a key part of a page, not a navigation nicety. They used to be available at the top of an article by default, until that started taking up a few inches of screen space across the board. We could still use a small bit of text reading also in N other languages that is similarly prominent: above-the-fold, near the top of the page. SJ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l I'm lost in this sea of emails. Is anybody arguing that showing interwikis expanded by default is hurtful? I understand that one dev said roughly: revert, this was designed so and any change must be authorized by howie and that (Sue?) said : we had a meeting and decided that hiding the interwikis wasn't really bad. And sprinkled over there I read a couple we hid them since they were cluttering. Now what is the argument about *that specific clutter* is bad? Who else besides UX opinion and staff supporting UX has an argument about showing interwikis being hurtful so much that the problems overshadow the benefits of showing them? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Greg, This makes two home runs in one month -- you get a prize. On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 4:00 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 2:03 PM, susanpgard...@gmail.com wrote: Austin, think about who everyone is. The folks here on foundation-l are not representative of readers. I think the people here are speaking up for the sake of the readers, and for the sake of preserving the best of the existing design principles used on the site. I know I am. Yes. We are skilled at these trade-offs as a community (by which I mean, those who care to do the work that must be done -- build up all parts of the sites, tell the world about them, greet the folks who join in, plan for the needs of those who read, write, draw, film, code, tag, and share). We may not yet have a deep bench of UI gods, but we have much to be proud of, and care a lot about such things. And we do not fear change -- we love new points of view. This list and those like it are some of the best groups I know of to vet and smooth such work once it is done. a point needs to be made clear: This community is who made the sites. I don't just mean the articles. I mean the user interfaces, the PR statements, the fundraiser material, _everything_. ... Just so. And the community runs the sites each day, and sees to most change that hits the site. Case in point: the new skin is one part of UI work, and a big chunk rolled out all at once, but much more is done each week step by step, niche by niche, with no fuss. We have an existence proof that the community is able to manage the operation of the sites at a world class level. Certainly there are many things which could have been done better, more uniformly, more completely, or with better planning... but the community has a proven competence in virtually every area that the foundation is now attempting to be directly involved in. The foundation can serve as a sure core of work and a hub for large tasks, but it is small next to the community as a whole. More raw work still gets done (in press and grants and style-work and thoughts on how to reach new groups) through the community and chapters. I guess the real power comes from that fact that every issue can be attacked by a custom small group from a nearly infinite set, plus a little crowd input. Whatever it is, it clearly works. It works as long as those small groups feel they can/should dive in and claim that work as their own. This takes love, trust (for the skills new groups bring, and for their own lore and views and sense of the world), and the will to share (a call to share the joy of work on a big task, not just to say one's piece and move on). I think it's unfortunate that the foundation has an apparent difficulty in _contributing_ without _commanding_. It seems to be hard at times, and a cinch at times. We talk most about the times when it is hard -- as we should; they need the most work. But we can learn from both. There are areas where the community's coverage is inadequate or inconsistent, and I think that dedicated staff acting as gap-fillers could greatly improve the results. But not if the price of those contributions is to exclude or pigeonhole the great work done by the broad community, either directly by we reached a decision-type edicts, or indirectly by removing the personal pride and responsibility that people feel for the complete site. Right. Erik writes: I would suggest the following approach: 1) That we return to the default-expanded state for now... 2) That we prototype the system above... by implementing 1), we can do 2) on a timeline that makes sense without a false urgency. +1 SJ -- Samuel Kleinidenti.ca:sjw:user:sjKat: tag, you're it ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hello, 2010/6/4 MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com: John Vandenberg wrote: While that is impossible (read: hard), a simple approximation is to display languages links for the 10 largest corresponding articles in other languages, and then show a more.. when there are more than 10. Another option is for contributors to specify which other interwiki links should be always visible; e.g. we would always want the FA's in other languages to be shown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Link_FA The KISS principle comes to mind here. Are there ways to improve the current language list in the future? Perhaps. But the best general solution (that's quickest to implement and doesn't rely on vaporware) is to simply fix the default. Personally, I see a sidebar with a lot of room and nothing else to fill it, so I don't really understand the current set of objections to showing the languages by default. A minimalist interface design is a nice goal, but it isn't always the best pragmatically. And in this case, pragmatism should beat out idealism. MZMcBride I fully agree with that. Yann ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hello, 2010/6/4 Platonides platoni...@gmail.com: James Alexander wrote: We have a couple threads on this issue but picking the most recent :). It appears that this has now been changed ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23497 ) and so once the next revision is pushed live the interwikis would be visible by default. James Alexander Spoke too soon. I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Fung hfung at wikimedia.org or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org This is bad. I think that interwiki links are an essential part of the Mediawiki interface. Hiding them in English Wikipedia will only reduce the accessibility of other languages, which is against our mission. Regards, Yann ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 06/04/2010 08:24 AM, Michael Peel wrote: On 2 Jun 2010, at 22:51, Gregory Maxwell wrote: A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand Can you justify that the change has now made it very hard for users of those interlanguage links? Given that it's now one click away (click on 'languages' in the sidebar) the first time, and then it stays there afterwards (this menu does stay expanded after the first time it's opened, right?), I wouldn't have thought that would make it very hard. No, the menu only stays opened until you close your browser. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 2:24 AM, Michael Peel em...@mikepeel.net wrote: On 2 Jun 2010, at 22:51, Gregory Maxwell wrote: A tiny benefit to a hundred million people wouldn't justify making wikipedia very hard to use for a hundred thousand Can you justify that the change has now made it very hard for users of those interlanguage links? Given that it's now one click away (click on 'languages' in the sidebar) the first time, and then it stays there afterwards (this menu does stay expanded after the first time it's opened, right?), I wouldn't have thought that would make it very hard. I would support it being expanded by default, though (even though I rarely use it myself) simply because it's a lot less intuitive to find the language links now, [snip] I think you mostly answered your own question for the most part. But I think my statement was intended to be a more general statement about comparing costs than really a statement that this makes wikipedia very hard: OTOH, if you don't read the language well and are depending on the inter-language links to get you to the right article in the right wikipedia, then the change did indeed make the site very hard to use. This is the subject of Noein's car analogy. I agree with the upthread comments on the roseate rectilinear lego-hat. It is as fertile a source of associations as any cloud could hope to be, but language is not among them. OTOH, I could make the same criticism for the watchlist star, which has the additional sin of conflicting with the use of the star iconography used for featured articles. As far as the the dynamic hiding goes, I'd like to toss in my voice against that: Determinism is very important for usability. Guessing what the user wants is great when it works but terrible when it doesn't. Computers are often _stupid_ but at least they tend to be consistent. The fact that you can learn to cope with their stupidity without much effort is often their one redeeming quality. Interface choices should favour determinism except when the cost of doing so is very high, the automatic mechanism is very very reliable, or the kind of non-determinism is very harmless and non-confusing. Anyone who has tried to get wolfram alpha to perform a specific calculation and suffered through a half hour of swapping around your word order knows of the frustration that can come from the computer trying to be smart and failing. In particular, that absence of a listing depends on an basically non-deterministic guess of what you want _AS WELL AS_ the article simply not existing is likely to be confusing. E.g. thinking an article only has a german version when the german version is featured. At the same time I think that changing the order, typeface, color, or adding iconography based on automated smarts is far less likely to result in confusion and is probably an OKAY thing to do. On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:09 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: . . . well, I can expand on this a bit. Wikipedia's goals can be summarized as Give people access to free knowledge. This can be measured lots of different ways, of course. But I see no reason why they shouldn't all scale more or less linearly in the number of people affected. [snip] Things like hiding inter-language links and switching to vector even though it locks out browsers used by many people more or less completely deny access to the site for people. I think it's really hard to justify effectively locking people out for the sake of the soft benefits of a great number of people. I'm not saying that there is a true hard incomparability. In general I think that denying _one_ person the ability to effectively use the site unless they understake a costly change in their client would justified by a small improvement for the bulk of the users... but only that it doesn't form a nice neat linear relationship where you can directly trade readers to usability fluidness. ... and that, as you described it, incomparability is a useful approximation much of the time. The approximation only really starts to fall down when you can make a serious argument that there is a true like for like replacement e.g. loss of life = actually saves two lives, as distinct from loss of a life = makes 2000 people live 0.1% longer. Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms). The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 06/04/2010 09:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell wrote: As far as the the dynamic hiding goes, I'd like to toss in my voice against that: Determinism is very important for usability. Guessing what the user wants is great when it works but terrible when it doesn't. Computers are often _stupid_ but at least they tend to be I'd remind here that at one point Microsoft added a similar feature to menus in Microsoft Office, not showing rarely used options by default. It was universally hated. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms). The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature. Of course not, I do this all the time (I even wrote about it), but I don't have any idea how many non-wikipedians use the interwiki links in this manner. On the list of research projects I wish someone would get around to: I would love to know more about unexpected/atypical uses of the projects like this... I guess the reference desk is a similar feature, an unexpected service cropping up in the middle of the encyclopedia. I wonder what others there are. -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Me three for using the interwiki links as a way of finding the word or phrase I'm looking for in another language (along with Wiktionary). Not only do they assist me in finding translations of the words or phrases I am looking for, they also give me context and relevant material for languages I'm comfortable using. They are also particularly useful for languages where I am not at all comfortable (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic) where I get results with images of the subject that confirm that I have found the right noun I need. Sometimes I get false positives, but unlike with my various dictionaries which I now rarely use, I can usually figure out pretty quickly that I have not got the translation I need. I'd be interested to know what the default languages I would get based computer profiling. Geolocating would put in me in Morocco (official language Modern Standard Arabic, though French is commonly used), browser configuration would give French, and Wikimedia system user preferences are set in English, simply because I predominantly use the English Wikipedia and English Wikinews; I'm far too lazy to have to translate the Wikimedia terminology in my head when navigating in French, German or Russian. AD 2010/6/4 phoebe ayers phoebe.w...@gmail.com On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 12:10 AM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? I've found it to be much more useful than automatic translation engines for mathematical terms (both more comprehensive but also in that it makes it easy to find the translations for many related terms). The hiding doesn't make this any harder for me, but it would make me a lot less likely to discover this useful feature. Of course not, I do this all the time (I even wrote about it), but I don't have any idea how many non-wikipedians use the interwiki links in this manner. On the list of research projects I wish someone would get around to: I would love to know more about unexpected/atypical uses of the projects like this... I guess the reference desk is a similar feature, an unexpected service cropping up in the middle of the encyclopedia. I wonder what others there are. -- phoebe ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hiding interlanguage links will worse the effect of Google search on some small language projects. See this previous thread: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-January/056671.html Present situation isn’t much better because intrelanguage links are at the end of a long list of things on the left side of the screen. It is not clear what they do, users only see a list of language names. From my point of view the “ideal” situation would be: 1) Hide the interlanguage links. 2) Guess if the user is multilingual and then highlight links to their languages. Saying clearly: You also can read this article in xxx and yyy language. There are several ways to guest the user languages: 1) Using IP address 2) History about previously visited language projects from same user or same IP 3) Allowing several languages in user preferences 4) Using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_negotiation … But if we can’t go to the “ideal “situation I think that for small language projects it is better left things as they are than hiding interlanguage links. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hoi, This would be a good idea only when you are allowed to choose the languages you do want to see. Thanks, GerardM On 3 June 2010 23:30, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 June 2010 19:04, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Yes, we discussed this internally as well as a better path to exposse Wikipedia's multilingual nature than to dump a long list of native language names in the sidebar (we might have an expansion link such as Show X other languages to indicate the large number of language versions available). This is a brilliant solution which should satisfy both concerns! How soon can we have this? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hoi, When you look where what languages have their biggest audience, you will be surprised. The notion of most likely languages is either based on such statistics or it is only guess work. The best performance is when people can choose the languages involved. It would make sense to combine this with the Babel extension... Thanks, GerardM On 4 June 2010 02:59, Howie Fung hf...@wikimedia.org wrote: Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably based on browser, and then a see other languages link which would expand to give all the other langauages. We're also looking at changing the word Languages into something that's more descriptive of what the links actually do. I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links Howie On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote: It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to discuss this. My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal interface object in fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it varied authomatically from article to article showed the overall level of progress on the multiple projects. In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and proved a very expressive statement. The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the relationship between the internal experts and the community. I think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the issue. I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Funghfung at wikimedia.org or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, When you look where what languages have their biggest audience, you will be surprised. The notion of most likely languages is either based on such statistics or it is only guess work. The best performance is when people can choose the languages involved. However, 'letting people choose' is only workable for regular, logged-in users. If we're talking about anonymous users, guessing is more or less our only option. It's not an easy task, but luckily we can choose to have 3 or 4 languages rather than just one, so there is some margin of error. Still - geolocation usually doesn't go beyond country level, and for some countries we already have quite a number of languages. Usually one or a few languages will be enough to give everyone something they can speak well, but if we show only those, regional languages would not be shown to anyone at all, and thus miss out on a good advertising location. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Hoi, It works indeed best for logged in users. However the statistics show that the main public for particular languages is not where you expect them to be. It is good to be generous in the number of languages that we show in my opinion. Thanks, GerardM On 4 June 2010 11:18, Andre Engels andreeng...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:42 AM, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com wrote: Hoi, When you look where what languages have their biggest audience, you will be surprised. The notion of most likely languages is either based on such statistics or it is only guess work. The best performance is when people can choose the languages involved. However, 'letting people choose' is only workable for regular, logged-in users. If we're talking about anonymous users, guessing is more or less our only option. It's not an easy task, but luckily we can choose to have 3 or 4 languages rather than just one, so there is some margin of error. Still - geolocation usually doesn't go beyond country level, and for some countries we already have quite a number of languages. Usually one or a few languages will be enough to give everyone something they can speak well, but if we show only those, regional languages would not be shown to anyone at all, and thus miss out on a good advertising location. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
2010/6/4 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijs...@gmail.com Hoi, It works indeed best for logged in users. However the statistics show that the main public for particular languages is not where you expect them to be. It is good to be generous in the number of languages that we show in my opinion. Thanks, GerardM Someone said earlier in the thread that the reason the links were hidden in the first place was that they weren't clicked on often in usability studies. But weren't the studies conducted on American people to see how they would edit the English Wikipedia? When you are monolingual and are already on your native language Wikipedia there isn't really a lot of use in going to another language. For multilingual people, though, that is not true at all. So assuming that I understood the reason behind it correctly, it isn't really a valid reason to hide them at all. -- Jon Harald Søby http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Jon_Harald_S%C3%B8by ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
2010/6/4 Jon Harald Søby jhs...@gmail.com: When you are monolingual and are already on your native language Wikipedia there isn't really a lot of use in going to another language. What's more, when that language is the one with the largest Wikipedia, you're likely to find the most comprehensive article of any language. Pretty much every time I see a non-Anglophone Wikimedian look something up on Wikipedia, though, they look it up in their native language first, then look for a link to the same article on enwiki (where there's probably a bigger article by virtue of sheer size) or another language they speak (for regional topics; e.g. a Flemish speaker checking frwiki for information on a city in Belgium). Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 4 June 2010 13:00, Austin Hair adh...@gmail.com wrote: 2010/6/4 Jon Harald Søby jhs...@gmail.com: When you are monolingual and are already on your native language Wikipedia there isn't really a lot of use in going to another language. What's more, when that language is the one with the largest Wikipedia, you're likely to find the most comprehensive article of any language. Pretty much every time I see a non-Anglophone Wikimedian look something up on Wikipedia, though, they look it up in their native language first, then look for a link to the same article on enwiki (where there's probably a bigger article by virtue of sheer size) or another language they speak (for regional topics; e.g. a Flemish speaker checking frwiki for information on a city in Belgium). Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:17 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review. I won't speak for the Foundation, but my understanding is that sampled click-rates were measured on the live site, so it would have been a representative sample of our visitors. -- Andrew Garrett http://werdn.us/ ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Andrew Garrett agarr...@wikimedia.orgwrote: On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:17 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review. I won't speak for the Foundation, but my understanding is that sampled click-rates were measured on the live site, so it would have been a representative sample of our visitors. In that case, I would also be interested to know whether the behaviour was any different on projects other than the English Wikipedia... (and whether there was any variation in the click rates based on country of origin or browser language). -- Bence Damokos ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Andrew Garrett wrote: On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 10:17 PM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: Can someone from the Foundation confirm whether any testing was done with people who would actually be affected by the decision to remove the language links - or only on people who wouldn't care? If only the latter, then the stated reason for removal would be in serious need of urgent review. I won't speak for the Foundation, but my understanding is that sampled click-rates were measured on the live site, so it would have been a representative sample of our visitors. Ah. But were they sampled percentage of *sessions* that clicked an interwiki link at least once, or just percentage of clicks from the gross amount of clicks? I think the former is significant, while the latter is much less so. Yours, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 4:37 AM, Joan Goma jrg...@gmail.com wrote: Hiding interlanguage links will worse the effect of Google search on some small language projects. It makes no difference to Google. The links are only hidden with JavaScript, and Googlebot mostly doesn't use JavaScript, so it will see them just the same. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Aryeh, imagine someone links you to an article on physics at ka.wikipedia. If there were a link that said English, you'd know what that meant, but if there's just a button that says ენები (Georgian for Languages), how are you going to know to click that rather than any of the other words on the page that to you probably appear little more than gibberish? (assuming you don't read Georgian - if I'm wrong, substitute it for any language that you don't know) Mark On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: 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. They can't? Why not? . . . well, I can expand on this a bit. Wikipedia's goals can be summarized as Give people access to free knowledge. This can be measured lots of different ways, of course. But I see no reason why they shouldn't all scale more or less linearly in the number of people affected. If we can get an extra piece of useful information to a billion people over the course of a year, why isn't that a billion times better on average than getting an extra piece of useful information to one person, for any definition of useful? If it isn't exactly a billion times, why should we believe that it's less than a billion (as you seem to suggest) rather than more? Cost-benefit analyses involving death are the same. People would like to claim that lives and money are incommensurable, say, but that's patently false. No one would advocate spending a trillion dollars to save one person's life -- if nothing else, you could save many people's lives for the same amount. Even if your only goal is to save lives in the short term, a life is worth *at most* X dollars, because you can straightforwardly exchange dollars for lives saved. In practice, X is probably less than 1,000 if you spend it right. When you deal with everyday situations, then saying lives and money are incommensurable is a good enough approximation. It doesn't work if you have lots of lives, or lots of money, or ways to exchange lives and money that don't come up in everyday situations. On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:28 PM, Noein prono...@gmail.com wrote: When you enter your car and drive to your destination, you make hundreds of gestures but use only once the key, at the beginning. And it would be a mistake to omit the keyhole altogether, or to make it hard to find if you look. But there's no need to make it as obtrusive and easy to reach as the steering wheel or the pedals. Indeed, you shouldn't, because that would take away attention and space from things that are more often used. A probable scenario: people reaching wikipedia on a foreign language click just once on the correct language, then may browse hundreds of articles without changing the language again. Is this probable? What are people's reasons for using interlanguage links? How many people miss them now that they're collapsed -- among the readership as a whole, not the extremely vocal and committed editors who read foundation-l and will find them easily anyway? ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
That's not good enough. First of all, people who don't speak a language won't recognize the text see other languages, or even languages. Could you pick the word ენები out of a page full of text in a foreign language and understand that clicking it would lead you to a link to the English version of an article? The reason your proposal to use geolocation or browser language is not good enough is that would still result in reducing the visibility of many, many Wikipedias. I think there are many users who would prefer to read articles in Catalan whose default browser language is set to ES, and geolocation will probably not solve that problem either. I think it is a mistake to hide ANY interwikis. clutter is not a huge sacrifice for people to make to vastly increase INTERNATIONAL usability. M. On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 5:59 PM, Howie Fung hf...@wikimedia.org wrote: Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably based on browser, and then a see other languages link which would expand to give all the other langauages. We're also looking at changing the word Languages into something that's more descriptive of what the links actually do. I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links Howie On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote: It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to discuss this. My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal interface object in fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it varied authomatically from article to article showed the overall level of progress on the multiple projects. In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and proved a very expressive statement. The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the relationship between the internal experts and the community. I think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the issue. I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Funghfung at wikimedia.org or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Mark Williamson wrote: That's not good enough. First of all, people who don't speak a language won't recognize the text see other languages, or even languages. Could you pick the word ენები out of a page full of text in a foreign language and understand that clicking it would lead you to a link to the English version of an article? Very well said. Indeed, the interwiki links are pointedly presented in the relevant languages/scripts, and the readers for whom they're most useful are among the least likely to comprehend the label under which they've been hidden. The reason your proposal to use geolocation or browser language is not good enough is that would still result in reducing the visibility of many, many Wikipedias. I think there are many users who would prefer to read articles in Catalan whose default browser language is set to ES, and geolocation will probably not solve that problem either. It appears that the idea's ramifications haven't been fully considered (in part because it's difficult for speakers of one language to appreciate the needs of another language's speakers). I think it is a mistake to hide ANY interwikis. clutter is not a huge sacrifice for people to make to vastly increase INTERNATIONAL usability. Furthermore, I don't recall _ever_ encountering a complaint about this so-called clutter. But I certainly have seen numerous complaints about the interwiki links' sudden removal (as many have perceived the change). Perhaps a suitable compromise can be devised, but in the meantime, the only appropriate solution is to display the interwiki links by default. It's unfortunate that this fix was reverted, let alone in the name of usability. David Levy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 4 June 2010 19:58, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Perhaps a suitable compromise can be devised, but in the meantime, the only appropriate solution is to display the interwiki links by default. It's unfortunate that this fix was reverted, let alone in the name of usability. Indeed. Could someone please answer: * What was the precise usability penalty of the interlanguage links being visibie by default? * What are the numbers behind this decision? And, most importantly, and the key question which people have been iteratively trying to find the answer to: * What would it take for the Foundation to agree to the interlanguage links being made visible by default once more? I hope the usability team can answer the above questions with as much detail as possible. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Wow, we get it. *No one* likes the hidden interwiki language link. Bottom line, the only people who may be annoyed(though I doubt really any are, and this was rather a decision to simply neaten the overall look of the en site) by the long list of languages are the regular users! Those people who can afford to hide it because they are familiar with WP in general. When I first started using WP, it was one of the LAST things I noticed about the surrounding links/tools; imagine if it were hidden Enough about supposed numbers and statistics, it just needs to be fixed. SOLUTION (as said by many before me) default: show interwiki language one click (if so desired by user/ip address): hidden ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Mark Williamson node...@gmail.com wrote: Aryeh, imagine someone links you to an article on physics at ka.wikipedia. Why would anyone link me to an article on ka.wikipedia? That's not a reasonable thing to imagine. I don't think I know anyone who speaks Georgian, and if I do, they wouldn't have any reason to link me to an article in Georgian. If they did, I'd probably use Google Translate. There are obviously going to be some cases where users wind up at a wiki they don't understand, for some strange reason. In such a case, having a pre-expanded language list is obviously useful. Even if they could figure out what other languages means, it's much harder to spot when collapsed. The question is whether the significant utility to this small group outweighs the slight disutility to a much larger group. On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 2:58 PM, David Levy lifeisunf...@gmail.com wrote: Furthermore, I don't recall _ever_ encountering a complaint about this so-called clutter. But I certainly have seen numerous complaints about the interwiki links' sudden removal (as many have perceived the change). Of course. Users don't explicitly complain about small things. They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things. But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users. Basing development decisions on who complains the loudest is what results in software packed with tons of useless and confusing features and lousy UI. Like most open-source software, including MediaWiki. Good design requires systematic analysis, ignoring user complaints if the evidence indicates they're not representative. Now, mind you, I don't necessary support getting rid of the interlanguage links. I'm mostly objecting to the reasoning being brought forward for that point, which seems to be mostly: * Some unknown number of users might somehow end up at a wiki they don't understand and not be able to find the wiki they really want. Maybe. Except we have no data to suggest that this happens with non-negligible frequency. The evidence apparently indicates that few people use the interlanguage links. * Lots of people have complained, therefore it must be a bad change. * Interface clutter isn't important anyway. The last two arguments are completely wrongheaded. The first might or might not have merit -- but no one has even attempted to propose what evidence we could gather to check it (I think). Most of the people making the first argument seem to assume without question that there *must* be a lot of people using the interlanguage links for this, or at least a significant number. This is not the way to conduct an informed discussion. In the absence of further data, the only real argument I saw for restoring the interlanguage links by default is to show how international Wikipedia is and raise awareness about how many other languages are supported. In this case they aren't actually meant to be clicked on, so a low click rate isn't a problem. They're more of an advertisement. This is a fairly reasonable argument -- the huge size of the language list is a plus, not a minus, from this perspective. I don't know if it outweighs concerns about clutter, though. Maybe. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 3:39 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.comsimetrical%2bwikil...@gmail.com wrote: In the absence of further data, the only real argument I saw for restoring the interlanguage links by default is to show how international Wikipedia is and raise awareness about how many other languages are supported. In this case they aren't actually meant to be clicked on, so a low click rate isn't a problem. They're more of an advertisement. This is a fairly reasonable argument -- the huge size of the language list is a plus, not a minus, from this perspective. I don't know if it outweighs concerns about clutter, though. Maybe. It isn't a bad argument, I know I consider it a good one, but the biggest problem I see at the moment is that I don't think normal users have any IDEA that they are hidden over there. I have yet to meet a reader who realizes that. I said earlier that I had had 5 people ask me why we got rid of the language links. I've had 2 more ask since then ask and 2 of the original 5 call me up and ask me to explain where the button was to show the languages because even after I told them it was there they couldn't find it. I would love to see a survey that asked readers if they saw them but I don't know exactly how you could word it. Obviously I'm someone who wants them there (for many reasons, the international component not a small one among them) and so am bias about it but I just don't see the argument that having them there causes to many issues. I also don't totally understand the the user just has to click once and then they're set argument. I've found that even as a user who is wandering around logged in I find myself having to click to open up the language links several times a day. I keep forgetting to throw something into my global.js so that it isn't an issue for me personally but :/ James Alexander james.alexan...@rochester.edu jameso...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 9:39 PM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.comsimetrical%2bwikil...@gmail.com wrote: Why would anyone link me to an article on ka.wikipedia? That's not a reasonable thing to imagine. I don't think I know anyone who speaks Georgian, and if I do, they wouldn't have any reason to link me to an article in Georgian. If they did, I'd probably use Google Translate. Just to illustrate this possibility: If I search for Fizika Wikipédia (Physics Wikipedia in Hungarian) the third result from the top is the Kikongo Wikipedia article - and there are other cases where Google offers Wikipedia results in unexpected languages especially if the search term's language and the Google interface language mismatches or if accent marks are ignored. Best regards, Bence ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Aryeh Gregor wrote: Users don't explicitly complain about small things. At the English Wikipedia, this is not so. If we had a bike shed, there would be daily complaints about its color. They especially don't complain about things like clutter, because the negative effect that has is barely perceptible -- extra effort required to find things. I've encountered many complaints about clutter at the English Wikipedia (pertaining to articles, our main page and other pages), but not one complaint that the interwiki links caused clutter. But if you take away a feature that's important to a small number of users, or that's well established and people are used to it, you'll get lots of complaints from a tiny minority of users. I realize that, and I once had a high-profile edit reverted because a tiny number of users (out of a very large number affected) complained. However, assuming that the interwiki links benefit a relatively small percentage of users (still a non-negligible number in absolute terms), I've yet to see evidence that displaying them by default is problematic. Like David Gerard, I desire access to the data behind this decision. David Levy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Aryeh Gregor wrote: Now, mind you, I don't necessary support getting rid of the interlanguage links. I'm mostly objecting to the reasoning being brought forward for that point, which seems to be mostly: * Some unknown number of users might somehow end up at a wiki they don't understand and not be able to find the wiki they really want. Maybe. Except we have no data to suggest that this happens with non-negligible frequency. The evidence apparently indicates that few people use the interlanguage links. * Lots of people have complained, therefore it must be a bad change. * Interface clutter isn't important anyway. The last two arguments are completely wrongheaded. The first might or might not have merit -- but no one has even attempted to propose what evidence we could gather to check it (I think). Most of the people making the first argument seem to assume without question that there *must* be a lot of people using the interlanguage links for this, or at least a significant number. This is not the way to conduct an informed discussion. It was requested somewhere on this thread to publish the data of the interwiki usage before CollapsibleNav and after. The difference should give an estimate of people which would have used it but was unable to find it out (as opposed to those who found it but needed an extra click for that). Since I was asked how would I search now? when showing the new look, I can understand that people don't find the interwikis, which are less prominent than the search bar! How many? I don't have enough data. I consider James and Casey reports quite important, since they will be people actually reaching us, which reports are a tiny percentage of affected people (even from the community, but specially from the large mass). In the absence of further data, the only real argument I saw for restoring the interlanguage links by default is to show how international Wikipedia is and raise awareness about how many other languages are supported. In this case they aren't actually meant to be clicked on, so a low click rate isn't a problem. They're more of an advertisement. This is a fairly reasonable argument -- the huge size of the language list is a plus, not a minus, from this perspective. I don't know if it outweighs concerns about clutter, though. Maybe. That's an interesting point. I was also wondering how it related to the accuracy perception. A fluent wikipedian probably consider an topic better (or improvable) if it has many interwikis. Or many FAs. As opposed to an interwikiless article, which is deemed of poor quality. These are probably automatisms we aren't aware of, so I don't see how it could be measured. Gregory wrote: Sort of tangentially, ... am I really the only one that frequently uses the Wikipedia inter-language links as a big translating dictionary? Add me to the list of people which hover the interwikis to find out a translation. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
The Usability team discussed this issue at length this afternoon. We listened closely to the feedback and have come up with solution which we hope will work for everyone. It's not a perfect solution, but we think it's a reasonable compromise. First, some background on the problem we're addressing and the design principle that we used. Every situation is unique, but in the case of the interwikilinks, we believe the sheer number of language links, especially within the context of an information-heavy page, makes users numb to the list. When people see large collections of things, they tend to group them all together as one object and not identify the individual parts that make the whole. As the number of items in the list decreases the likelihood of a person identifying the individual items increases. This is similar to how viewing a traffic jam appears as a long line of generic vehicles, while seeing just a few cars driving down the road might be comprehended in more granular detail (a motorcycle, a truck and a sports car). While we did not explicitly test for this during our usability studies (e.g., it wasn't included as a major design question), we did exercise judgement in identifying this as a problem, based partly on the applying the above design principle to the site, partly on the data. Regarding the data behind the decision. First, let me apologize for the tardiness. The engineer who implemented the clicktracking of the left nav recently returned from vacation, so you can probably imagine how things might be a little difficult to find after being away for a while. Please see [1] for more details, but a quick summary is that we measured the click behavior for two groups of English Wikipedia users, Monobook and Vector (Vector users are primarily those who participated in the beta). Of Monobook and Vector users, 0.95% and 0.28% clicked on the language links (out of 126,180 and 180,873 total clicks), respectively. We felt that fewer than 1% of Monobook clicks was a reasonable threshold for hiding the Language links, especially when taken in the context of the above design principle and the implementation (state persists after expanding). We do, however, recognize the concern that was voiced by a number of our community members. When the language links are in a collapsed state however, there is not enough information to explain what the list will be if you were to expand it. In all likelihood, we won't be able to get the verbiage to the point where it's sufficiently descriptive of the inter-language links. A list of languages is probably more effective as it *shows* the user that there are other languages available (rather than *telling* the user via a Language, In other languages etc. link). However, exposing all of the languages can potentially be just as ineffectual as showing none of them. A more effective approach would be to balance the two, by showing just enough links to clearly illustrate the meaning of the list. So our proposal is to show a list of, say, 5 languages with a more link. We think that a list of 5 languages should be sufficient to communicate to the user that there are other language versions available. If the language they want is not on the list, they may click more to see the full list. There are numerous ways we can populate the list of 5. The simplest way is to populate based on the current order, but we can also do it based on size of the wiki, browser language, geo IP, etc. Our proposal is to go with something simple for now, and then continue to explore options for greater customization. We hope this compromise addresses the most pressing concerns that have been raised. I will update the page on the usability wiki with the above information [2]. Please direct discussion/feedback to that page. Thank you for your input. Howie, on behalf of the User Experience Team at WMF [1] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Left_Nav_Click_Data [2] http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links On 6/4/10 3:21 PM, Platonides wrote: Aryeh Gregor wrote: Now, mind you, I don't necessary support getting rid of the interlanguage links. I'm mostly objecting to the reasoning being brought forward for that point, which seems to be mostly: * Some unknown number of users might somehow end up at a wiki they don't understand and not be able to find the wiki they really want. Maybe. Except we have no data to suggest that this happens with non-negligible frequency. The evidence apparently indicates that few people use the interlanguage links. * Lots of people have complained, therefore it must be a bad change. * Interface clutter isn't important anyway. The last two arguments are completely wrongheaded. The first might or might not have merit -- but no one has even attempted to propose what evidence we could gather to check it (I think). Most of the people making the first argument
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
A minimalist design is a good goal to strive for. As many people do mot use them, it may be a good cleanup of the interface. Howver, for its afficionados the developers might create an option in the user preferences to show all interwiki links directly instead of hiding them. Personally I find them very useful when i got to translate things, much better then wiktionary, both by the size of the wikis and by the accompanying text which helps sorting out any homonym problems. On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 2:55 AM, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 5 June 2010 01:03, Howie Fung hf...@wikimedia.org wrote: First, some background on the problem we're addressing and the design principle that we used. Every situation is unique, but in the case of the interwikilinks, we believe the sheer number of language links, especially within the context of an information-heavy page, makes users numb to the list. When people see large collections of things, they tend to group them all together as one object and not identify the individual parts that make the whole. We believe = no data, then? In a list of language links, people will immediately notice the one that they can read: their own language, i.e. the one they're looking for. While we did not explicitly test for this during our usability studies (e.g., it wasn't included as a major design question), we did exercise judgement in identifying this as a problem, based partly on the applying the above design principle to the site, partly on the data. You've just said it was on judgement and *not at all* on any data. Thank you for your input. This is implemented in each wiki's [[MediaWiki:vector.css]]. As such, if a wiki votes to reverse this interface change, and your proposed compromise solution - will they be able to do so, or will the Foundation impose the change upon them regardless? i.e., is this content control by the WMF? I ask based on the preremptory tone used by Trevor Parscal in reverting the original change. - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Howie, Thanks for your detailed message. I appreciate your efforts of trying to listen to the feedback from the community. However, even after listening to the discussion in the office today, and after reading your message, I still fail to understand the logic behind these decisions. I'm going to try and summarize your paragraphs into a few sentences; please tell me if I got something wrong In a paragraph, you explain it is your belief that in Monobook, the long list of languages made it difficult for the user to identify this area as a list of languages. In the following paragraph, you say you tracked the clicks in the sidebar in Monobook, and found that less than 1% of users clicked on a language link. You then explain you hid the list of languages because this number showed it wasn't used. Perhaps I'm just beating a dead horse, but, looking at these two arguments, a fairly reasonable hypothesis to make is that users don't click on the languages links *because* they don't realize it's there. A fairly reasonable design decision would be to try and make it more discoverable, and you could measure the impact easily by seeing if more users click on the language links. Instead, you chose to hide the list completely. I still fail to see how this decision could be an attempt at fixing the issue you had discovered. Maybe users don't think of a traffic jam as a list of cars. But showing an empty road hardly makes things better. -- Guillaume Paumier [[m:User:guillom]] http://www.gpaumier.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
[replying here and at http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion_Language_Links] Howie Fung wrote: First, some background on the problem we're addressing and the design principle that we used. Every situation is unique, but in the case of the interwikilinks, we believe the sheer number of language links, especially within the context of an information-heavy page, makes users numb to the list. I regard this as an unreasonable assumption. In my experience/observation, readers saw the links and recognized them as a list of articles in various languages. Most didn't wish to view such articles, so they paid no further attention to the list until such time as they did. (No harm done.) Meanwhile, users wishing to view articles in other languages (a small percentage, but a large number in absolute terms) knew exactly where to look. To equate this unusual type of list with large blocks of text in general (without any data to demonstrate the principle's applicability) is to completely ignore context. When people see large collections of things, they tend to group them all together as one object and not identify the individual parts that make the whole. As the number of items in the list decreases the likelihood of a person identifying the individual items increases. This is similar to how viewing a traffic jam appears as a long line of generic vehicles, while seeing just a few cars driving down the road might be comprehended in more granular detail (a motorcycle, a truck and a sports car). This analogy fails to consider a very important distinction. Unlike the motor vehicles, one (or a small number) of the links on the list are meaningfully different from the user's perspective. To a reader of Japanese, the 日本語 link stands out in much the same way that an ice cream van would stand out in the aforementioned traffic jam. The other links, being foreign to this particular user, do not compete for attention (and therefore are less of a distraction than the random cars surrounding the ice cream van are). While we did not explicitly test for this during our usability studies (e.g., it wasn't included as a major design question), we did exercise judgement in identifying this as a problem, based partly on the applying the above design principle to the site, partly on the data. Said data indicated only that the interwiki links were used relatively infrequently. Apparently, there is absolutely no data suggesting that the full list's display posed a problem. Rather, this is a hunch based upon the application of a general design principle whose relevance has not been established. Aryeh Gregor: You cited the importance of data (and the systematic analysis thereof). In light of this explanation, what is your opinion now? A more effective approach would be to balance the two, by showing just enough links to clearly illustrate the meaning of the list. So our proposal is to show a list of, say, 5 languages with a more link. We think that a list of 5 languages should be sufficient to communicate to the user that there are other language versions available. If the language they want is not on the list, they may click more to see the full list. If the language that the user seeks is not visible, why do you assume that he/she will recognize the list's nature? Imagine seeing the following on a page full of similarly unintelligible text: Ectbadi Feskanalic Ibsterglit Kreviodeil Tionevere Straknaj 6 tak Would you recognize the first five items as languages and the last as Show 6 more? Compare the above to this: Bacruhy Ectbadi English Feskanalic Ibsterglit Kreviodeil Nuprevnu Ootredi Rozlovatom Tionevere Zidentranou And keep in mind that the above allows for the use of Ctrl-F to find English on the page. There are numerous ways we can populate the list of 5. The simplest way is to populate based on the current order, but we can also do it based on size of the wiki, browser language, geo IP, etc. Browser language and location detection are the best of the above options, but they're far from flawless. It's been explained that there are reasons for speakers of some languages to set their browsers to other languages. Location detection is not entirely reliable and only enables en educated guess as to the language that someone speaks. To me, all of this comes across as a manufactured problem in search of a solution (while the initial change was a solution in search of a problem). Our proposal is to go with something simple for now, and then continue to explore options for greater customization. Or you could simply restore the one-line code modification that provided the default behavior requested by the community (pending evidence that an alternative setup is beneficial). David Levy ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 8:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com wrote: Who cares if people click them a lot? The space they formally occupied is filled with nothing now. They were equally valuable as a marketing statement about the breadth and inclusiveness of our project as they were as a navigational tool. Concealing them behind the languages box also significantly reduces discoverability for the people who need it most: Someone who, through following links, ends up on a wikipedia which is not in their primary language. Before they needed to scroll down past a wall of difficult to read foreign language, now they need to do that and expand some foreign language box. I agree with every one of these points, and want to emphasize the last—a person may be able to recognize the word for his language in another random language, but he probably won't recognize the word for language itself. (I think I can recognize it in most European languages and maybe a handful of others, but that's still assuming I was actively looking for it in the first place.) Last night I was discussing this with Finne (henna), and she proposed that we might show a default list based on the user's most likely language(s), while still keeping the others collapsed by default. This could be done using the HTTP accept-language header—which would, at the very least, show you your native language. (And perhaps, if someone's feeling adventurous, augment that using a GeoIP system. There are lots of possibilities.) But I'm not volunteering to code it, and I'm not asking anyone else to. I'd be happy if we just returned to the previous, useful behavior. Austin ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
We have a couple threads on this issue but picking the most recent :). It appears that this has now been changed ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23497 ) and so once the next revision is pushed live the interwikis would be visible by default. James Alexander james.alexan...@rochester.edu jameso...@gmail.com ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 3:00 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: http://languageicon.org/index-icon.php That icon seems about as intuitive as the name Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch for FlaggedRevs. We could make a different icon, the idea is having a single symbol for language. The only relevant mental association that comes to mind is robot tongue. Then it is quite intuitive. :P Anyway, I prefer to have the language list as before. -- Fajro ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On 3 June 2010 19:04, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Yes, we discussed this internally as well as a better path to exposse Wikipedia's multilingual nature than to dump a long list of native language names in the sidebar (we might have an expansion link such as Show X other languages to indicate the large number of language versions available). This is a brilliant solution which should satisfy both concerns! How soon can we have this? - d. ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
James Alexander wrote: We have a couple threads on this issue but picking the most recent :). It appears that this has now been changed ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=23497 ) and so once the next revision is pushed live the interwikis would be visible by default. James Alexander Spoke too soon. I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Fung hfung at wikimedia.org or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to discuss this. My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal interface object in fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it varied authomatically from article to article showed the overall level of progress on the multiple projects. In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and proved a very expressive statement. The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the relationship between the internal experts and the community. I think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the issue. I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Fung hfung at wikimedia.org or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Michael Snow wikipe...@verizon.net wrote: Erik Moeller wrote: 2010/6/3 Fajro fai...@gmail.com: Maybe we should support the Language Icon idea: http://languageicon.org/index-icon.php That icon seems about as intuitive as the name Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch for FlaggedRevs. The only relevant mental association that comes to mind is robot tongue. As a sports fan, to me it looks like the backboard of a basketball hoop. I actually rather liked Hyperion Frobnosticating Endoswitch, but such a wonderful name deserves to find a more worthy home than the MediaWiki pending changes feature. I'm with Michael on this point: such a great name should be the name of the entire new skin, or perhaps a new version of MediaWiki itself: this 'pedia runs on HYPERION FROBNOSTICATING ENDOSWITCH technology. Alternatively, it could make the best magic word ever. Who knows what such a variable would do? Re: list of languages, I like having the big list of languages present in the sidebar for the reasons David, Austin Greg mentioned. (It's not exactly like our site is uncluttered even without it: every article is a *giant list of words*, surrounded by *even more words*, and people seem basically fine with this). In every presentation I make about Wikipedia I emphasize its multilingual nature -- being as multilingual as we are is both unique and special on the internet, and is one of the things that makes us great, and we should show this feature off as well as we can. That said, having the # of languages and/or a global selector as others have mentioned are both good ideas too and could be a good compromise. -- phoebe -- * I use this address for lists; send personal messages to phoebe.ayers at gmail.com * ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably based on browser, and then a see other languages link which would expand to give all the other langauages. We're also looking at changing the word Languages into something that's more descriptive of what the links actually do. I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links Howie On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote: It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to discuss this. My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal interface object in fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it varied authomatically from article to article showed the overall level of progress on the multiple projects. In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and proved a very expressive statement. The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the relationship between the internal experts and the community. I think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the issue. I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Funghfung at wikimedia.org or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
Any see other languages link should take into account the nature of the article; an article on a Japanese topic should display the Japanese wp link (if any) . This would not be impossible to do programmatically. On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 8:59 PM, Howie Fung hf...@wikimedia.org wrote: Per Erik M.'s previous post, we're working on a compromise solution whereby we show a list based on user's most likely language(s), probably based on browser, and then a see other languages link which would expand to give all the other langauages. We're also looking at changing the word Languages into something that's more descriptive of what the links actually do. I've created the following page for more discussion/proposals on the topic: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Opinion:_Language_Links Howie On 6/3/10 4:41 PM, David Goodman wrote: It would be nice to actually have a place at the usability wiki to discuss this. My own view is that the actual list of languages was the ideal interface object in fulfilling many purposes (as discussed in the posts above) and implying multiple levels of understanding without the need for explanation or discussion. For example, that it varied authomatically from article to article showed the overall level of progress on the multiple projects. In showing Wikipedia to new users this list was always noticed and proved a very expressive statement. The attitude shown by Trevor's reply speaks for itself in terms of the relationship between the internal experts and the community. I think that it was his wording that induced me to finally post on the issue. I fixed it (it's a one-line change), but Trevor reverted it: This goes against an intentional design decision. To discuss that decision further and submit proposals to change this design please contact Howie Funghfung at wikimedia.org or visit http://usability.wikimedia.org ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l -- David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Fri, Jun 4, 2010 at 11:04 AM, David Goodman dgoodma...@gmail.com wrote: Any see other languages link should take into account the nature of the article; an article on a Japanese topic should display the Japanese wp link (if any) . This would not be impossible to do programmatically. While that is impossible (read: hard), a simple approximation is to display languages links for the 10 largest corresponding articles in other languages, and then show a more.. when there are more than 10. Another option is for contributors to specify which other interwiki links should be always visible; e.g. we would always want the FA's in other languages to be shown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Link_FA -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
John Vandenberg wrote: While that is impossible (read: hard), a simple approximation is to display languages links for the 10 largest corresponding articles in other languages, and then show a more.. when there are more than 10. Another option is for contributors to specify which other interwiki links should be always visible; e.g. we would always want the FA's in other languages to be shown. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Link_FA The KISS principle comes to mind here. Are there ways to improve the current language list in the future? Perhaps. But the best general solution (that's quickest to implement and doesn't rely on vaporware) is to simply fix the default. Personally, I see a sidebar with a lot of room and nothing else to fill it, so I don't really understand the current set of objections to showing the languages by default. A minimalist interface design is a nice goal, but it isn't always the best pragmatically. And in this case, pragmatism should beat out idealism. MZMcBride ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
Re: [Foundation-l] hiding interlanguage links by default is a Bad Idea, part 2
On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 5:48 AM, Aryeh Gregor simetrical+wikil...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 2:50 PM, Gregory Maxwell gmaxw...@gmail.com 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. They are not mostly-useless controls; they are there because _building_ content _in every language_ is our mission. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Our_projects Missing interwikis are a valuable cue that a block is missing. -- John Vandenberg ___ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
