[Foundation-l] Usability: Is our vocabulary SNAFU?

Tue Dec 9 23:48:47 UTC 2008

Ziko van Dijk wrote:
> About usability: I believe that one significant barrier for new Wikimedians
> is the jargon in the Wikimedia projects, mostly in discussions, but also in
> help pages:
> * Expressions from computer science: IP, bug, URL
> * Expressions from the Open Source movement: fork, stable version
> * Expressions from the net culture: imho, :D, lol, @ (directed to a person
> in a discussion)
> * For non native speakers of English: SNAFU, dude
> 
> Jargon (sometimes specialist's language) cannot be totally avoided, and it
> is good for community cohesion. But it would be a good step towards
> usability thinking before using jargon: is it really necessary here, is it
> comprehensive to everybody, even if "help:glossary" mentions it?
> 
> Ziko

It surprised me that the jargon didn't mention the really wikimedian
terms: AGF, RFA, NPV, NOR, NLT, BLP, NPA, AFD, db...

After IAR and BOLD, you're blocked for NPA and NLT on a BLP article
where you didn't follow NPV, although the other part didn't AGF.
OTOH, the article could have been deleted per G4 or G10. Maybe you
should complain to ARBCOM, but wait, I better shut up per BEANS, DNFTT.

I don't consider myself an outsider, still -as a contributor to
different wikis- I don't know by heart what's an 'A3.1416 deletion' or
the proper templates and pages to start a deletion procedure for an
image with a disputable source.

Acronyms may still be worked out, others are unrelated, unless you
already know it. Worse, each wiki has its own [[WP:WP]] creating their
dialect.

Is it good, is it bad? Probably neither, but something to have really
into account for usability.