2011/3/31 Amir E. Aharoni <amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il>: > The Vector skin, the main product of the Usability Initiative, was > deployed on Wikimedia projects in April 2010. > > Quoting usability.wikimedia.org: "The goal of this initiative is to > measurably increase the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors by > improving the underlying software on the basis of user behavioral > studies, thereby reducing barriers to public participation." > > In the year that passed since then, did anyone measure whether the > usability of Wikipedia for new contributors increased?
The usability initiative was accompanied by three qualitative studies: http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Evaluation_Study http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability_and_Experience_Study http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/Usability,_Experience,_and_Progress_Study Our studies validated that the changes we made did indeed by and large have the intended effect of simplifying the experience of new users. With that said, the aggregate editing trends continue to be troubling. See, for example, this page for a comparison of active editors across languages: http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediansEditsGt5.htm .. and, of course, the editor trends study and the New Wikipedians numbers. But, these larger trends aren't purely technical trends -- they're social trends as well, and it's entirely possible that no amount of technical improvement is going to even make a meaningful dent unless/until we also make progress on making Wikimedia projects more open and more welcoming. We haven't deployed some of the last-stage features of the project yet. These include an in-editor outline of the article headings, a tabbed view of preview/edit, and a default collapsed view of templates. Making template collapsing work cleanly in all browsers and for all document operations turned out to be very hard (due to the wrangling required to make the browser's rich-text-editor behave essentially like a beefed-up code editor), so we may not ever add that feature to a wikitext editor (as opposed to a visual editor). The other two features are likely doable with some more effort, but we're prioritizing them against other improvements and the visual editor effort itself. So, in sum, 1) our qualitative research has shown an improvement for new users, 2) the quantitative trends are troubling, and it's not demonstrable that we've made a difference either way in the larger trends (which aren't purely technical but also social trends), 3) there's still quite a bit of code that we may end up picking up again but that's not currently running on WMF projects. I'm happy that we've done Vector as a first step, but it's just that - a first step. -- 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
