Now hiring for Wikipedia Usability Initiative
January 9th, 2009I’m very happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation is now opening hiring for the Wikipedia Usability Initiative!
Realized by a grant from the Stanton Foundation, the goal of this initiative is to measurably increase the usability of Wikipedia for new contributors by improving the underlying software on the basis of user behavioral studies, thereby reducing barriers to public participation.
We have three positions open, all local in San Francisco. See the linked pages for details and how to submit your CV:
The new team will be lead by project manager Naoko Komura, who was very helpful in organizing localization and translations for our recent fundraiser, and will coordinate closely with me and the rest of Wikimedia’s core developers. Also joining the project will be Wikimedia staff developer Trevor Parscal.
As always, all of Wikimedia’s software development is open-source, and we expect to be able to roll improvements into the live Wikipedia environment and general MediaWiki releases over the course of the project.
Brion Vibber
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
January 9th, 2009 at 10:42
That is the usability project without usability expert? :D
January 9th, 2009 at 12:06
Also, posting a local jobs instead of an online ones is a luxury that could bring less efficiency and higher cost.
January 12th, 2009 at 19:00
We’ve got plenty of experience with online remote work — there are pluses and minuses to both models, which is why we use both! For a focused team which will be doing user testing, working distributed is not really ideal.
January 14th, 2009 at 05:31
Great, now all you have to do is hire a ‘normal’ everyday user to give you REAL feedback instead of relying on only “experts, designers,and devlopers etc, to see if what you think you are provideing really works from the layman perspective with ‘user related expierence’ providing insight that is not driven by stale, static, enviornment. I’ll volunteer with a small hourly rate. To often Co.s put out product they “think” are good and never really develop something ‘normal’ people find user friendly and useful in the real world.
January 24th, 2009 at 14:42
I wrote something about localisation on [[:meta:Talk:Stanton Usability Initiative]].
January 24th, 2009 at 14:45
Sorry if this is a duplicate.
I just wanted to mention [[:meta:Talk:Stanton Usability Initiative]].