Couple of studies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dr_pda/Article_referencing_statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dragons_flight/Log_analysis

You guys should give Dr pda and Dragons flight $1000 each to create a bunch of nice stats, since they already do great jobs for free and I’m sure it would cost much more to get an outside stats person.

Reading those survey, I’m sure we would get a lot of unsuspected help that way.

SJ – We can’t tell you how much we appreciate and agree with your comments. You’ll be happy to know that these issues were brought up and uncovered in our interviews as well as in our brainstorming! There are so many possibilities for change that think would benefit current and potential readers and editors. Being limited in resources and time we will have to be strategic in moving forward with those that can have the greatest overall impact.

Albert Francis – While many of us at the foundation and many community members have strong opinions and instincts on what the barriers are for new editors, it would be unwise to base our design and development decisions on our feelings alone. The study was conducted in part to validate some of these common assumptions while also allowing us to uncover any other major potential barriers that we had not thought of or experiences….which it did.

FT2 – Thank you for your thoughts and potential solutions. We have been busy brainstorming implementation solutions, some of which closely resemble yours. As we prototype and iterate on solutions, we will be sharing as much as we can with the community. It would be great to get more feedback and suggestions from you as we go.

Gregory Kohs – No it will not. But our finding that users were inhibited when they received conflicting messages and by their lack of knowledge of the proper rules and etiquitte will be.

Bawolff – Discussions of live previews, wysisyg and such are all in session.

pfctdayelis – Thanks for reading! We are very glad there is such an interest in our work from the community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=User%3AUsability_Tester_3

In other words, my response to this video would be to develop a simple rich text editor that handles /basic/ wiki markup in mainspace at a minimum:

1/ SPLIT OFF HEADER TEMPLATES, CATEGORIES AND INTERWIKI LINKS: – use expanding boxes for “tags at the top of the page >” and “categories >” or “cross-language links >” so the main rich text edit area is kept for the actual core article text for simplicity.

2/ KEEP IT SIMPLE, MOST BEGINNERS DON’T NEED THE MORE COMPLEX MARKUP: – make the main text area handle sections, lists, bold/italic, and wikilinks, transparently… and a click button for “add reference” or “add a link to another website” which would guide the user to enter the needed data to go with those.

3/ USE A “BASIC/ADVANCED” EDITOR OPTION: – I’d then have in config whether the “advanced” (current) editor, or the “simple” editor, is the default for a new/IP user on each namespace (you’d want “advanced” for templates for example), and add a “switch to advanced/simple editing” button to the edit screen. That way the current editor won’t scare people off.

This would take care of transition for new editors, making it much easier to make the first few edits. We can worry about rich text for other users, or more complex text entry, later, but this basic change would at least remove the barrier for users new to wiki.