On 4 January 2011 19:56, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
The other
reason is that our usability research has shown that collapsing
elements can in fact increase initial newbie confusion as it becomes
harder to make a direct match between the two representation modes
(Ctrl+F for something you're trying to change no longer works).
Yeah. This is why usability testing is *not optional*. Programmers are
*regularly* surprised by what actual users do with their creations.
Wikipedia already has many productive contributors who are smart,
knowledgeable and clueful but basically can't work computers - but can
just about cope with wikitext. Imagine if we could get *eight times*
the contributor pool, the areas of human experience we could cover if
we got in people who were even worse with computers but knew about
things other people didn't.
The team is currently focused on finalizing the new
ResourceLoader,
which will generally make our front-end code more manageable, as well
as finishing up phase 2 of the article feedback pilot (the little
rating widget showing up on some articles) and ironing out bugs in the
new upload wizard. But as we start into 2011, I'm hopeful that we can
come up with a good development and staging plan for immediate
improvements to the editing interface, as well as a longer term
re-architecting towards rich-text editing which ideally allows for
incremental benefits to be deployed to WMF projects.
What are their thoughts on the Wikia WYSIWYG editor? I presume Wikia
did usability tests. I don't like the Wikia editor a lot (and find it
opaque), but I can cope with wikitext.
- d.