User:Church of emacs

Hi, I am Church of emacs. I'm interested in MediaWiki and especially MediaWiki's usability as I often see how developers focus too much on the developer point of view on the software. No offense, really. I have great respect for the people developing MediaWiki and I admire their work. But nobody is perfect and sometimes I believe they tend to favor consistency over usability. Sure, consistency is very important. But let's never forget for whom the software is written: for the users.

One example:

I opened Bug 16950 over one month ago and sadly did not get any response yet. The bug is an enhancement request, so that when creating/viewing a previously moved, but now deleted page, the move log is shown (at the moment only the deletion log is shown). If the user searches for an article that has been moved to somewhere else with suppressredirect, then this information is not displayed. (The technical reason is this: Page A with title a gets moved to title b. The redirect from title a to title b is suppressed. As Page A has now title b and there is no page associated with title a, if the user tries to find out where Page A went, he's not going to be successful. The deletion log is empty, as Page A has been moved, not deleted, and there has been no redirect that has been deleted. The information is only stored in the move log... which is not linked in any way.) The information where the article went after is hidden somewhere in the logs... and it takes some skill to find it. (Actually, if you use the standard user interface, you have to click on "Special pages"->"Logs"->enter Title and select "move log" and press "Go". Not really intuitive, I do not expect any newbie to find this.)

Showing information where it is needed is important.

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear more about the usability project and how to contribute. You can contact me on my talk page (or even better, leave me a note on my German Wikipedia talk page).

About me

I'm currently a sysop on the German Wikipedia, and an OTRS member. I do some bug reporting on MediaWiki, but I'm not really that much into software development of MediaWiki, mostly because I am still a php newbie.