[Foundation-l] Moving towards a more usable MediaWiki

Tue Dec 2 13:13:02 UTC 2008

On Tue, Dec 2, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> Over the last weeks I have been rather active in promoting improved
> usability for the MediaWiki software. What really got me going was learning
> from a Wikimania presentation that a UNICEF usability study done in Tanzania
> showed that 100% of the test subjects were unable to create a new article.
> UNICEF has created extensions to improve on this, extensions that make a
> difference. The fact that our usability is poor does not only hurt what some
> call "minority languages". A professor in Austria I know, a veteran user of
> software, was also hard pressed to collaborate on a wiki.
>

The problem for usability is that sometime there is not a better
selection of users to have a "real" sampling.

Naturally if this sampling is formed by users with a poor or no
knowledge of computers, probably they will not have problems with
Wikipedia because they would not able to switch on a computer. The
usability, in this case is the minor problem.

Probably is better to know if they were not able to use the edit
button because the edit button is not "usable" or if they were not
able because they don't have seen an "edit" button in the past.

Ilario