Proposal talk:Improving our platform

Frank, this is great. Thank you :-) Sue Gardner 07:03, 25 November 2009 (UTC)

See OSX Wiki server for good usability and wysiwyg-editing. It's very simple, but extremely effective. On the other hand, Mediawiki needs to have a better technical platform as well. There should be a way to unify/connect the same articles of different language and use the same statistics/image information on each easily - so that when one place is updated the all the others are updates as well. --82.181.72.46 22:12, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Frank, this is really intriguing. I'd like to suggest some other ways to help new contributors to feel welcome and become successful. I don't know how complex the technical aspects are, but let's start the discussion:

1. When a new user creates an account, have a pop up box that welcomes him/her and offers a mentor and also takes 1-4 sentences to explain their user page and the talk pages. Rationale: 1. hook up a new user with someone who knows the ropes. 2. new users don't know about these special pages/tools and can get confused about what happens to their work because they haven't seen the discussion
2. while the new user is not yet a "validated user" (or only has some low number of edits) don't revert their work (unless OBVIOUS VANDALISM). Instead, have a mentor proactively respond to their work to explain what the problems are. (assume good faith) What do I mean by proactive? again something obvious that they can't miss since they might not check the discussion page yet. Not sure exactly how to do this when there is lag time between the edit and a review/change but let's think about it.
3. When there has been X amount of time since they've created an account or x number of edits, what about a thank you/congratulations/keep it going message?

Marlita 00:58, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

"Missing opportunities for social interaction"

I think that this is exactly the wording for our core problem. We simply lack communication with new people. I believe that compulsory registration would be already a step to the right direction because communication with IP users remains difficult. And new people do not even realize that IP editing is seen negatively by many experienced users.--Ziko 16:33, 5 January 2010 (UTC)

Live interaction - Chat-while-editing? Collaborative editing?

It would be nice if people got feedback as they edited. Asynchronous sequential editing is very impersonal, especially if your edit gets reverted. Even if your edit survives, you feel more like an isolated contributor than a shared owner, until/unless someone says "Nice job".

Imagine if when you were considering contributing to a page you could see who's online of those interested in the page. You could then either chat with them about your proposed change, or maybe even do a collaborative edit session if you weren't sure how to do it. (Right now Facebook tells me I have 4 people online I can chat with.)

-- Skierpage 23:58, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

Where are the communities of shared interest?

Also I don't know how to hook up with a community interested in an area. I've edited a lot of electric vehicle pages, I have ideas for wider improvements to the category, but I don't know where to find people interested in discussing them. "The Village Pump" (WTF?), all those badges on people's userpages, all the WP:WTF terminology are arcane BARRIERS to finding the community. I guess I could go to a single page's Talk: page and hope the right group are watching it, but it's just unclear. -- Skierpage 23:58, 1 February 2010 (UTC)

German text

What about providing a translation for the german text for us de-0 readers? Platonides 20:39, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry, German text to what? ~Philippe (WMF) 20:41, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Facts: A growing number of non-contributors complain about anonymity on Wikipedia, e.g.:

“Aber einmal angenommen, ein Neuling holt sich einen Login, meldet sich an und beginnt an einem Artikel zu ändern. Dann passieren einige Dinge und eine Menge Dinge nicht. Ausgehend auf meinen Erfahrungen und denen der von mir befragten nicht repräsentativen Stichprobe gibt es keine Kontaktaufnahme von Person zu Person und auch kein kurzes konkretes Howto mit Beispielen 'So geht's - und so nicht': Wikipedia bleibt ein anonymes Objekt und versäumt die Chance, sich ein persönliches Gesicht zu geben.”

^ That text. --Platonides 23:20, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Am I losing my mind? Where are you finding that text? ~Philippe (WMF) 23:22, 27 January 2010 (UTC) Found it.

The translation is: "Imagine that a newbie gets an account, logs in and starts editing an article. Then some things happen and some don't. According to my experiences and a small sample of people I have asked there is no making contact from person to person, and no short useful how-to with examples - 'do it this way, not that one': Wikipedia remains an anonymous thing and misses the chance to give itself a personal face." / I liked to translate that because I have made similar experiences.--Ziko 12:04, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

WYSIWYG

The section "Embrace non-tech savvy users: add WYSIWYG editing functionality" remembers me the September that never ended :) Everybody will tell you that WYSIWYG would be a great feature, but our wikisyntax is not completely representable with WYSIWYG. Although usability initiative guys are working on improving it. Platonides 20:39, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

• I'm curious. What parts of WikiSyntax do you think will be hard to do with WYSIWYG? Randomran 04:19, 2 February 2010 (UTC).

For example, with WYSIWYG you cannot see remarks within the wikisyntax code.--Ziko 20:11, 3 February 2010 (UTC)