Wikipedia's getting a new look
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I have a student who has just completed an honors project that demonstrated that if you give web novices a simple markup language and a non-WYSIWYG editor (but do give them a preview button) they confirm presentation but focus on content, which ultimately makes websites more usable and often prettier too. It won the ugrad research competition at SIGCHI this year, so I don't think she was out in left field on this.
So, short version: Wikipedia's making a big mistake here.
IMHO, it's a small step, but in the right direction for sure.
For example, the functional separation of the content tabs (article, discussion) from the tabs representing what you're doing with that content (read, edit, view history) is a good improvement. But the design used to implement that is terrible.
There's no boundary between the top of each tab and the space above it, making it difficult to recognize the tabs as a tab interface at all - it looks like loose text in the middle of some whitespace. And there's no design element that represents the hierarchy of content - the read, edit, and history tabs are now on the right side of the screen, but how would a new user know they are subordinate to the article and discussion respectively?
I think Wikipedia misstepped here. They should have gradually introduced each new design element and proven that it could fit successfully into the structure of the site before building further on the innovations. Releasing an entire top-down redesign all at once is going to create a lot of unnecessary disruption.
The FAQ entry linked ( http://usability.wikimedia.org/wiki/What%27s_new,_questions_... ) has a lot more info than the announcement, the primary entry there is:
Why are you making these changes?
Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation are written and edited by volunteers. When knowledgeable people cannot participate in editing Wikipedia because they find it too confusing or difficult to edit articles, it is a serious problem that undermines the potential quality, breadth and depth of the content that we can offer to you. In other words, even if you don't contribute content, the easier we can make it for knowledgeable people to join our projects, the more useful our resources become to you.
So it seems they're really focusing on making the editor user friendly.
They also say that this is only the beginning of a series of changes.
Yes, they consider users to be potential contributors.
For what it's worth, personally my own edits seem to stick around - I write a lot about architecture (buildings), industrial design, and software. I've written about Ron Arad, Konstantin Grgic, Zaha Hadid, btrfs, SystemTap, Python, Django, Zed Shaw, and popular culture in Portland, and they've all still there. I appreciate you may have had different experiences.
When someone goes through the trouble of creating a well-cited article only to have it deleted for being 'not notable', they're unlikely to bother again. If there's a Wikipedia issue to resolve, it's the deletionists and the strange environment which encourages their behaviour.
The lead on WikiEditor (Trevor Parscal) just did a presentation at PARC. If you want to learn more about the tradeoffs you can watch that video.
http://www.parc.com/event/1108/how-wikimedia-is-scaling-open...
We know that it doesn't look that different, but there are several big reasons for that.
The grant for this project was time limited, and the low-hanging fruit about usability turned out to be a lot more about organization and cleaner design. A lot of people just couldn't even find the edit button.
In any case, despite looking more or less the same, there's a much, much better jQuery-based system under the hood now, and it's on a much better foundation for adding features. Years of cruft have been cleared out.
The User Experience team is now a permanent aspect of the WMF, so we can start thinking about longer term ideas. WYSIWYG might be one of them. Stay tuned. Or, check us out -- our process is very, very open, and anyone can voice their concerns.
I tried out the new look in beta beginning more than a month ago. The most habit-changing change was the relocation of the search input field. But that just gets it closer to the industry standard of being in the upper right of the page, so I'm gradually getting used to that.
You're very likely to run into these issues if you contribute to certain topics. Examples include living persons, video game characters, some piece of software you wrote, or anything else that's not very notable, controversial or hard to find references for.
However for the vast majority of topics this isn't an issue. If you're just writing about a place, landmark, some historical character, a scientific discipline or any of the topics that make up ~80% of the actual content on Wikipedia you're not going to have your article listed for deletion.
Do you mean "contributing to Wikipedia as someone without a user account"? I just started doing Wikipedia edits, having first set up a Wikipedia account, when I declared a vacation from Facebook. I like to contribute good content to the Interwebs. On Facebook, I was mostly contributing links to articles about Facebook privacy issues. While I was taking a break from Facebook, another HN participant linked to a Wikipedia article in an HN thread, and I saw an edit I could do there that would change the close-enough-for-government work word into the exactly correct word. So I made the edit. Later I made a more substantive edit and added a recent reference to a more visited and more controversial article--on a subject much discussed here on HN. Over time, I will check how well my edits are accepted. Someday I'll try posting a whole new article, when I have a sense of what is missing and have reference materials at hand. I'll evaluate my experience by how other Wikipedians respond to my edits.
I probably did a few hundred edits and contributed 30 or so new articles. As far as I know, not one of those things survived the first month.
I haven't even bothered after that experience. Citing the submission guidelines led to nothing.
The cabal of super-user types there that seem to want to fix wikipedia on the current status quo (unless they themselves edit something) made wikipedia at the time unbearable as a new contributer. It wasn't like there were even requests for changes or new edits (things that wouldn't have been a problem since I was new and learning the ropes) -- just deletions. Sometimes within minutes.
It wasn't even that somebody had come along and cleaned up my submissions, or provided some editing work, just....gone.
After that wonderful experience I decided to spend those few hundred hours someplace else.