To write a comment on this website I can click on “reply”, then write my text and click “submit”. On Wikipedia I would have to click on “edit” then find the right section to reply to. Once I have found it I have to decide on the right combination of * and : to put in front of my reply. After I wrote my comment I have to sign it by writing ~~~~. After jumping through those hoops I can click on “publish” (a recent change because user research suggested people were confused by “save”).
Then if I’m lucky my post is published. If I’m unlucky I have to deal with a merge conflict. It’s hard for me to see Wikipedia here as user-friendly.
This creates a pressure where some discussion about Wiki editing get pushed to Facebook or Telegram groups that are more user-friendly to use because it takes a lot less effort to write a new message.
When it comes to menus you have a left side menus. You have the menus on the left and right side on the top of the article. Then you have the top menu on the right side. It’s not clear to a new user why “related changes” is somewhere completely different then “history”.
More importantly the kind of results that A/B testing reveals are often not as obvious but there effects accumulate. The fact that Wikipedia lost editors over the last decade is for me a sign that they weren’t effective at evolving software that people actually want to use to contribute.
To write a comment on this website I can click on “reply”, then write my text and click “submit”. On Wikipedia I would have to click on “edit” then find the right section to reply to. Once I have found it I have to decide on the right combination of * and : to put in front of my reply. After I wrote my comment I have to sign it by writing ~~~~. After jumping through those hoops I can click on “publish” (a recent change because user research suggested people were confused by “save”).
Then if I’m lucky my post is published. If I’m unlucky I have to deal with a merge conflict. It’s hard for me to see Wikipedia here as user-friendly.
This creates a pressure where some discussion about Wiki editing get pushed to Facebook or Telegram groups that are more user-friendly to use because it takes a lot less effort to write a new message.
When it comes to menus you have a left side menus. You have the menus on the left and right side on the top of the article. Then you have the top menu on the right side. It’s not clear to a new user why “related changes” is somewhere completely different then “history”.
More importantly the kind of results that A/B testing reveals are often not as obvious but there effects accumulate. The fact that Wikipedia lost editors over the last decade is for me a sign that they weren’t effective at evolving software that people actually want to use to contribute.