Last modified: 2009-12-04 18:57:06 UTC
Hi, This message concerns the developpers and designers of Wikipedia. It is not about a specific bug, but about design issues. I am an occasionnal Wikipedia contributor and I really love your site. However, I think that with the web standards evolving so fast, Wikipedia's user interface is now getting old (not much evolution since I started to use it some 5 years ago). I am talking about the look and feel, the general ergonomy of the site. It is alright now (but not great), I think a lot can be done in order to improve it. A few examples : when editing an article, there should be a WYSIWYG edition window, the background color of the site could also change in order to reflect the fact that you are in edition mode. A better visual distinction between the abstract of an article and the content would also be nice. In Wikimedia Commons, the feature picture voting procedure is just repelling. I used it several times but I have to says that it looks like if it was designed to keep normal people away from getting involved... Also, I have used many forums, but none had such a weird user interface as the one hosted by Wikipedia : The wiki script is good for some uses, but it was not design for pools nor for forums ! Wikipedia's purpose is to make a great (probably the best) encyclopedia, not about doing everything with the wiki script only. The wiki script is good for editing content of the encyclopedia, but for other tasks there are other open-source scripts that are far more convenient. Please keep in mind the following : The user/contributor should only have to focus the content, not on the technical things. Google started Knol not long ago. They are using fixed width for their pages. I don't konw if it is a better design choice, but I think Wikipedia should really watch if some of their ideas concerning the design are not more confortable for the user. Thanks for all the work you have done, and please, keep it on the cutting-edge of user-experience ! Noé Lecocq
Adding myself to the CC list. A few notes: * Work on workflow / better voting et cetera is something that I'm working on. See, in particular, the DeleteQueue extension. * WYSIWYG is long-requested, and certainly badly-needed, but it's a difficult task. I've had some success with the Wikia FCKeditor extension, but it's not there yet. * Threaded discussion is under development, as the LiquidThreads extension (I've got it in testing, and there are still *some* bugs to work out).
This needs to be broken into separate requests; some are duplicates (eg wysiwyg).
See [[meta:Wikipedia Usability Initiative]] L http://usability.wikimedia.org/
Closing as INVALID. Individual things like LiquidThreads and FCKEditor (or other WYSIWYGs) have their own open requests for enhancement, etc. The "Commons Featured Picture Voting" thing is something specific to Commons, and should probably be raised there.