On 3/23/11 2:56 PM, Chitu Okoli wrote:
Oh, I definitely agree that grad student contributions are
tremendously
valuable! (especially having been on until very recently)
My point was this: that writing for a lay audience and writing for
fellow researchers (grad students included) are different tasks, and
mixing them leads to reduced value for each audience.
I am fine with each paper having a "for laypeople" and "for researchers"
section to the summary.
Sorry, Reid; I misunderstood you. I should have said so in my last
post, but I certainly do agree with you that it would dilute the
usefulness of the articles if they were all written to be accessible
to "laypeople"; this kind of simplification would not be as useful
to many researchers. I agree that a good solution would be to have
the main summary or description written for researchers (who would
be the primary audience), but also to include a "For laypeople"
section, so that if anyone is inclined to rewrite the main summary
for a more general audience, they could do so without affecting the
more technical summary.
Right; what I meant was that while AW does use MW it doesn't *look like*
it does, and that's a barrier to entry, which matters. The default skin
needs to look more like default MediaWiki.
>
Actually, I don't agree with Reid on this point. Appearance is very much
a subjective issue. Here's my purely subjective opinion:
* I find it irritating that hundreds or thousands of MediaWiki instances
all look like Wikipedia, as if MediaWiki didn't didn't have any skinning
flexibility. (I'm assuming that when Reid says "look like the default
MediaWiki", what he effectively means is "look like Wikipedia"; Reid,
please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you.)
* I like the AcaWiki interface; I wouldn't want to change it to look
like Wikipedia.
Less subjectively, I don't think that the appearance is a significant
barrier to entry. Saying, "It works just like Wikipedia" should do the
job fine to communicate the familiarity of the wiki language.
My concern is less with aesthetics than what the interface looks like it
does (the "apparent affordances" to use some jargon). As an analogy, I'm
sure many of you have encountered Java and Flash applications which have
all the same GUI widgets (buttons, scroll bars, etc.) as native OS apps,
but they look slightly different. Obviously one can overcome the
differences, but unfamiliarity makes the apps harder to use and turns
off newbies (or even experienced people who are sick of the
"specialness"). (Kai's Power Tools is a classic offender in this regard
- where are the controls in this screen shot and how do you use them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kai%27s_Power_Tools.jpg).
Wow, I don't know what he was thinking, but I guess Kai figured that
displaying the power of Photoshop art was more important than
usability! Maybe I should keep this example for the UI design
portion of my systems design class :-)
I could certainly be wrong, but this is professional rather than
personal opinion, as someone with an HCI education. Sorry for the lack
of citations. I do agree that aesthetics is to some degree subjective.
I don't necessarily believe that we need it to be the standard MW look
in all respects (though I personally like the consistency), but the wiki
controls need to be consistent with other MW installs (most importantly,
Wikipedia) so people can see easily that it's a wiki and in particular
one they've used before.
Actually, the controls seem to me to be quite similar to the
standard Wikipedia layout. For example, look at