English Wikinews adopted the usability beta as default
October 30th, 2009
Earlier today, English Wikinews adopted the usability beta as a default interface. The usability team is thrilled that en.wikinews community has reached the consensus to be the first adopter of the usability beta as default. We will continue enhancing the interface to simplify and make it easy to navigate and edit. Our sincere appreciation goes to the entire en.wikinews community for embracing our work. It is a great day for the usability team. We feel blessed.
Naoko Komura on behalf of the entire usability team
Program Manager, Usability Initiative
Tags: usability
October 30th, 2009 at 23:49
Thou hast a typo in the blog post headline!
But, I think this is great. English Wikinews took one look at the early beta and redesigned the main page to match it.
October 30th, 2009 at 23:59
Typo fixed! *cough*
October 31st, 2009 at 13:47
The first, still many wiki’s to go :)
October 31st, 2009 at 17:25
Pardon my typo!! Thanks to David for correcting it.
October 31st, 2009 at 20:16
Even the blog is a wiki, every typo gets fixed :D
October 31st, 2009 at 23:54
I will bring up one other tenuously related issue – which might be of interest to the usability team, and would probably need their involvement.
Jon, one of the ‘crats on enwn, has set up http://enwn.net. It’s a URL shortener, but it will only make a shortcut for Wikimedia Foundation websites. In looking for a more project-neutral short domain, we’ve ended up registering wmf4.me and would like to see that handed over to the foundation for this very purpose.
Currently, most wikis have a “Permanent link” in the sidebar. On English Wikinews we’ve a gadget for a ’short url’ which works with the enwn.net domain (and the wmf4.me one). Jon has added a primitive preview option (add a “-” to the URL), but this poses privacy-policy/oversight related issues. Whatever is running as a URL shortener should have database access. It should be smart enough to take the hash or key for the short URL and say “This is as of ” or “This is difference on between and “. where it hits a deleted page or oversighted edit, it should delete the hash/key and return no identifying information.
Plus, the WMF should ideally be the ones with the server logs on this – not Jon.
October 31st, 2009 at 23:56
Damn, need to read the source on my post :(
Teh blog needs “preview”
November 1st, 2009 at 16:59
I rather don’t like to see that the Wikimedia Foundations use a url shorter for permanent links, a shorter is good for use in IRC or twitter or things like that but we also need to remember that people need to see Http://en.wikipedia.org or Http://commons.wikimedia.org because the name lets people remember our site, with the use of a shortening it will be lost.
(kind of offtopic btw)
November 3rd, 2009 at 22:42
URL shortening is kind of off-topic for the usability intiative here, as our main focus is on editing. It’s a nice idea, but it looks like it still needs to be discussed a little bit, and if we decide we want it, it can be done without our intervention.
November 15th, 2009 at 06:34
I do not like the new look. Current Wikipedia look is better.