This page containts some notes about the parts of the Wikipedia UI that I don't like. These are personal opinions, not professional assessments. Also, I haven't yet made any effort to see if there are some overriding factors that make these non-problems, if I've missed something, or if these points have already been discussed. These are just some notes I may take further later.
- Tabs and the toolbox contain rather similar functions and yet they are apart. I often spend several seconds trying to find the backlink and user contributions listings. Also, the toolbox contains functions with different scopes (e.g. what links here, special pages).
- The reason of redirection may not be clear. If the logical place to explain a term is below the fold, I'm often left wondering why I got redirected to that page. On the other hand, redirecting to a section of the page might also contribute to the feeling of being lost.
- Some article suggested to create a tiny article that explains the relationship. I wonder it would be possible to add a kind of redirect and prepend redirection to MediaWiki, where the contents of a redirect page would be prepended to the redirect target. This might be doable since Wikipedia doesn't use HTTP redirection for article redirection.
- It isn't possible to know if the alternate language version of an article is as comprehensive as the English version. Sometimes the articles in the Finnish or Swedish Wikipedia are even more comprehensive than the English counterpart, but to know this, I'd have to click the links and check. Maybe Wikipedia could somehow indicate if the length of the related article is very small (e.g. stub) or much bigger (say, 30% more). This would probably get more useful the worse command of English the person has.
- WikiProject Echo attempts to find good source articles from other languages. Though I still think that automatic indication might help too.
- Creating pretty tables takes some effort and knowledge of HTML and CSS.
- There seems to be a template to address this problem, {{prettytable}}.
- There doesn't seem to be a way to create image links. It is a common convention that a thumbnail image accompanying a story is linked to the said story. In the Wikipedia front page, the images are linked to larger versions of said images.
- The breadth and recentness of discussion related to an article is not indicated at the article page. There probably somewhat correspond to the importance of reading the talk page and may help casual readers encounter the side-channel.