Talk:Usability, Experience, and Progress Study

A WYSIWYG interface

Really? The first commenter here? OK, I'll take a chance.

So glad you are using newbies in your tests. I bought a BOOK on Wikipedia ("How Wikipedia Works") and consider myself a PC user of moderate expertise after 25 years or so. But I find the non-WYSIWYG editing/article creation interface as daunting as no doubt many do.

If this ever expands to an online focus group, I'd LOVE to be part of it, as a frequent Wikipedia USER, but VERY infrequent writer/editor, despite my intense desire to do so. It all reminds me of the arcane, early Word Perfect circa '80s "you need a keyboard color-coded gude to know what you're doing" situation.

True user-friendliness would bring a tidal wave of contributors - good, bad and ... well, I know that I just read that article about the 'inclusionists' war. Maybe Wikipedia would create levels or areas of various loose/tight filtering - public vs. professional. Segmented doesn't have to mean confining - it could be freeing!

Good luck and again, I'm one of those folks who, along with time constraints, just find Wikipedia's ~ and curly-q standards foreboding and forbidding. I'd love for it to have a 'command line" interface for the pros, and a true WYSIWYG system for the rest of us - even if it means the tradeoff is fewer power-user options for us who wouldn't use them anyway;-) -- Barney Lerten 26 December 2009 (UTC) - (My name somehow got deleted in the additions to this page, so have restored it with a few added thoughts)

Hello. I'm also a user at Wikipedia. I found it very easy to understand MediaWiki's wiki syntax (because I'm a technical person), but very difficult to understand Wikipedia's pages and pages of rules. Even after all these years, I still can't understand all of them, but I've sort of got the gist of the basic stuff. --Mephiles602 09:37, 15 November 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your support. It is amazing that every new user we interview, we find some new page, some new rule, some new message that we (staff memebers) had not previously seen! We are definitely being cautious about the way we are approaching "lowering the bar" for the many types of contributors and potential contributors - mostly trying to work on that "foreboding and forbidding" part before anything else. --Parul Vora 00:00, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

WYSIWYG - Yes

I use mediawiki software, v1.11 I think, with the FCK_Editor. I tried making it work with 1.15 and was defeated. Now, I don't have alot of time to work on this. But wouldn't a WYSIWYG the first usability feature you would think of? And since FCK_Editor (or whatever they've changed their name to) has been around for years, isn't it a natural choice for a higher level of productization for this project?

Whether you use FCK or not, get into the 21st Century and implement this.

I think everyone agrees, that a WYSIWYG would be awesome. But technical difficulties caused by WYSIWIG plus Wiki-Syntax are really huge. See the FCK Editor for example, which already exists for some time, but is still not a 100% convenient editor. That's one reason, why the usability initiative focuses on minor changes with high usability impact, that can be done within the project scope.--Juxn 09:29, 27 December 2009 (UTC)