MediaWiki interface to get a facelift edit
- By Hermione1980, 15 December 2008
The Wikimedia Foundation announced on December 3 that it received a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation to make Wikipedia's editing interface more user-friendly.
Wikipedia has been derided as being hard to edit. For example, this WebProNews article says that Wikipedia's guide to editing pages would "cause even English majors to say, 'I ain't reading all that.'" This Wired blog post calls the editing interface "very techy", speculating that that is an intentional discouragement of would-be spammers.
The Stanton Foundation grant is the first step to remedying this problem.
"Wikipedia attracts writers who have a moderate-to-high level of technical understanding, but it excludes lots of smart, knowledgeable people who are less tech-centric," said Sue Gardner, Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation. "One of our key priorities is to attract those people and persuade them to help write and edit the encyclopedia."
The project, which will be led by a five-person team of three software developers, a user interface designer, and a project manager, is scheduled to begin in January 2009 and finish in April 2010. The goal is to hide some of the complexities of the MediaWiki software from users who don't need to see it. According to Erik Moeller on the Foundation-l mailing list, the main focus of the project will be "user testing designed to identify the most common barriers to entry for first-time writers, and a series of improvements to the MediaWiki interface…to issues identified through user testing and…hiding complex elements of the user interface from people who don't use them. (Specifically, we'll focus on complex syntax like templates, references, tables, etc.)"
There will be two phases to the project. Phase 1 will address some of the simpler barriers to editing, such as the visibility of the "edit" button. Phase 2, which will start in late summer 2009, will focus on simplifying the wiki code.
For more information, see the Wikimedia Foundation press release, the Stanton Grant Q&A, and Erik Moeller's post on Foundation-l.