In April, the Wikimedia Foundation is rolling out the first of several significant changes to the user experience of Wikipedia as part of our usability and user experience program.

• We are changing our default look to a new theme we call “Vector” which makes essential functions easier to find.
• Editing pages will be easier, thanks to a new editing toolbar that makes it easier to insert links and tables, and a built-in “cheatsheet” to access help for the most commonly used functions.
• All users will also see that the site layout has changed noticeably.  We’ve simplified the site navigation, relocated the search box to satisfy user expectations and to follow other web standards, reduced some of the clutter, and made sure that the new features work with different resolutions, browser formats, and window sizings.

We will begin deployment of these changes in the week of April 5 on Wikimedia Commons, the media repository used by Wikipedia. Provided that we don’t encounter major hiccups with this first roll-out, we are planning deployment of the changes to Wikipedia in late April, beginning with the English Wikipedia, followed by other languages. Logged-in users will have the option to return to the classic functionality using a one-click process.

These improvements have been in use by more than 500,000 “beta” users over the last six months, and have been localized, including right-to-left language support. (More localization work is welcome — please join our localization rally if you can.  Eighty-percent of users who have tried the new “beta” apperance have stayed within the beta program.  These changes are also the result of qualitative user research undertaken by the Wikimedia Foundation.

On the English Wikipedia specifically, we’re also enabling the creation of PDFs files and printed books from Wikipedia articles to all users (a service previously restricted to logged-in users only). And, we’ll start roll-out of a refined version of the well-known Wikipedia globe logo, correcting small mistakes and representing new languages.

These changes are only the beginning. We’re also testing a set of additional editing and navigation improvements that we are planning to implement later this year:

• We’re reducing the amount of wiki code users see in the edit system and making it possible to change data in tables and information boxes through simple forms.
• We’re cleaning up the edit page itself, to use more understandable language and get rid of confusing clutter.
• We’re providing a new outline tool to navigate a long article while you’re editing it.
• We’re simplifying the search by getting rid of the confusing combination of the “go” and “search” buttons, moving instead towards one search button.

These changes will be available as opt-in beta features to registered users to allow wider testing, and will be validated by further user research before deployment. Finally, we’re also working on an improved interface for uploading images and video, and searching our existing multimedia repository. See the multimedia project hub for more information.

Our overarching objective is to make it easier to find and contribute knowledge in Wikipedia and its sister projects. Volunteer participation is the essence of everything we do; our job is to facilitate and support that volunteer work. Continually improving the experience our projects is now a core mandate of the Wikimedia Foundation.

The work over the past year has been funded by the Stanton Foundation, and our ongoing work on multimedia improvements is funded in part by the Ford Foundation and conducted in partnership with Kaltura. We’re very grateful to these partners and funders for supporting our mission.

Software developers are invited to review this under-the-hood explanation in our technical blog that describes the impact of these changes on bots, scripts, and gadgets interfacing with Wikimedia projects. We’ve also started a Q&A on the Usability wiki that we’ll develop through the roll-out.  You can use the Q&A ‘talk’ page to propose other questions. Check back in with the Wikimedia blog for regular updates throughout the process.

Thanks for your interest,

Naoko Komura and the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team

Starting the week of April 5th, the Wikimedia Foundation will begin rolling out changes to the default settings on all projects. Wikimedia Commons is planned to be switched over first, and English and other language Wikipedias, and our sister projects will follow as our development and operations teams are ready.

What will change?
The default MediaWiki skin in all Wikimedia Foundation projects will change from Monobook to Vector, and the editing toolbar will be replaced with the new enhanced editing toolbar with dialogs for inserting links, tables and more. These features will be familiar to users who have chosen to opt-in to the beta that has been available since August 6th, 2009.

Who will be affected by this change?
Anyone using the site anonymously, or logged in users whose settings are set to the current site defaults. Users who are affected by these changes may also have user scripts and styles which may not perform similarly to how they did before the swtich-over, or may not be loaded at all. Also, some gadgets, community-developed features available through the user preferences, may not be compatible with these changes. Users who have enabled those gadgets may experience issues related to these incompatibilities. Fortunately, many of the most popular gadgets have already been adapted to Vector during the beta testing period.

Finally, external tools which use screen-scraping to access content rather than the API may be affected by this change, as the HTML structure of Vector is different in some ways from that of Monobook. If, on the other hand, you have built an application that relies on the MediaWiki API to process content, your application will not be affected by this deployment.

How can users make sure their user scripts, user styles, gadgets and external tools will still work?
By testing them with the new settings, you will be able to verify compatibility and resolve any issues. By clicking the “Try Beta” link at the top of any page, and then opting into the beta, you will have turned on the same settings which will be made default.

Another way to test skin compatability is to append “?useskin=vector” to the end of the URL of a page.
For example, the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation would become http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation?useskin=vector to see how the page would look using the Vector skin.

What if users decide they want to return to the previous settings?
When a site is switched over to the new settings, the “Try Beta” link at the top of each page will be replaced with a set of links which will provide more information about what changes have been made and a convenient way to change users settings back to how they were before the switch over.

Naoko Komura and the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team

Wikimedia projects support over 270 languages. This amazing global reach is powered by volunteers who translate not only the contents but also text used in MediaWiki so that localized wikis can be easily navigated and operated by users in their local language. Translatewiki.net is the amazing translation engine which not only supports Wikimedia projects but other open source projects. Siebrand and Nike are leading this translation platforms.

The user experience programs at Wikimedia Foundation is also benefited from translatewiki.net and translation volunteers. The usability beta has been completely translated into thirteen languages and twelve languages are 99% complete. These stats can be found at the translation completion status page for the usability extension by courtesy of GeardM.

The usability beta is planned to be switched to be the default interface in April. Additional translation boost for languages which are not fully translated will improve the usability of the new interface greatly.
GerardM had a great example of the interface in Nepali, whose localization is not complete, in his blog.

Translation help for such as Indonesian, Greek, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, Sinhala, Korean and much more, are greatly appreciated.

Another update from the ongoing Wikipedia usability team…

Links are an important part of creating resourceful Wikipedia articles and also help increase an article’s relevance in search. They also fortify the linkage among Wikimedia projects and strengthen the whole open web ecosystem.

Have you ever had a difficult time inserting links to articles of Wikimedia projects? What do the single square brackets do? How is it different if double square brackets are used instead?

Soon you may no longer need to answer this question.  The Usability Beta (the Wikipedia usability testing platform) now includes dialogs that simplify the creation of links and tables. The link dialog detects if the article you are typing exists or not. The table dialog helps you create tables by specifying the number of rows and columns when creating a table.

These features are now turned on as part of the Beta.[1] If you are an wiki syntax expert and you do not need this kind of aid, you can simply turn it off by adjusting your preferences. Here’s how.

The user experience program team hopes that you find the dialog intuitive to use. We look forward to hearing your feedback here.

- Naoko Komura
User Experience Programs

[1] Dialogs are not available for Internet Explorer users at the moment. We expect to support Internet Explorer users soon.

Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries.

However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects.

We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused.

Update: Unfortunately, for many, this outage seems to have lasted longer than an hour. It appears that many ISPs’ DNS resolvers do not honor the so-called Negative Cache TTL that we send (1 hour), and instead use a longer value. We have circumvented this problem by renaming the affected DNS record to something else.

Update 21:32 UTC: Our SSL gateway, secure.wikimedia.org, was disabled due to overload issues, but is now back up.

Today, our friends at the Open Video Alliance launched an important advocacy project (see their announcement), called “Let’s Get Video on Wikipedia“. The project aims to motivate more people to take and upload relevant educational video content to Wikimedia’s media repository, Wikimedia Commons.

Video can play an important role in an encyclopedia and in other learning resources. Whether it’s clips of animals, speeches, interviews, excerpts from important films, explanatory animations, footage of historical events, or even collaboratively created documentaries exploring complex topics — video can enrich our learning experience. There are about 4,500 video files in our media repository today, a tiny number. We don’t expect that Wikipedia will turn into “Wikitube” anytime soon, but we do hope that thousands more relevant educational videos will find their way into articles in our projects.

The Wikimedia Foundation also believes that two things need to change for video on the web: it needs to break out of the Flash container used for most video on the web so that developers can build smarter and richer applications, and it needs to be shared in a free format so that anyone can shoot and broadcast video without paying fees. That’s why we use an open video standard for all our videos. The “Let’s get video on Wikipedia how-to” provides simple instructions to convert video into a free and open format and upload it. And, of course, all video content on Wikimedia Commons can be re-used by anyone for any purpose: we’re open all the way.

The campaign is being co-organized by Mozilla Drumbeat, Wikimedia New York City, and the Participatory Culture Foundation, makers of the open source Miro video player and downloader.  It’s also a trial-by-fire for some of the new video technology we’ve been working on in partnership with Kaltura. In short, it’s a demonstration of the power of building alliances. If you’re a video maker or a web developer, we hope that you’ll join us in supporting open standards and free educational video content.

Wikipedia volunteer TheDJ provides some further under-the-hood information in his blog summary.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Registration for the Developers’ Workshop in Berlin on April 14.-16 is now open: please use the registration form. Registration is required and will be open until March 21., but there are only 50 places available. So, sign up soon!

Wikimedia Germany invites all MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, Gadget hackers, and other people interested in the technical side of Wikimedia projects to come to the Workshop. We have a very nice venue and a cool option for accommodation, details to be announced soon.

For updates and more information, watch meta:Wikimedia_Conference_2010/Developers’ Workshop. You can also get updates via twitter or identi.ca.  If you have questions, please contact us at conference@wikimedia.de.

Another quick update from the Wikimedia Usability team — the Foundation team working on user interface and editing system improvements for Wikipedia and the Foundation’s projects.

If you are one of the usability beta users, you might have noticed that dialogues for links and tables, and dynamic collapsible table of contents have been disabled. We regret that we had to take away these features temporarily. The babaco enhancements release which was deployed in February caused text formatting problems. So we decided to temporarily disable these features until we have solid solutions. The plan is to restore at least the dialogue feature mid-March.

The beta opt-in rate in February suffered from challenges as well. It is possible that the decline is related to the formatting issues with the release mentioned above, but we could not pinpoint the correlation. February ended with a total of 571,579 users having tried the beta. Although the monthly retention rate for all projects for the month declined by one percent to 80.4%, the cumulative retention rate since the beginning of the beta in August 2009 across all projects held steady at 79.8% as of February 28. Close to a half million users continue using the beta, so we wish to restore all beta features as soon as possible. The updated beta status by Howie is found here.

Lastly, we have a pretty big release coming up this month. The release nick name is Citron, and it is scheduled in the week of March 15. The main feature of this release is to collapse templates, aka scary double curly brackets in the editor, and provide a form-based interface, so that users do not need to navigate through the templates. Mock-ups, Parul, Hannes, Nimish and Adam worked on, can be found here. Template-collapsing and form-based editing interface will be staged on prototypes soon and we will send out invite for you to play with it. These features are planned to be enabled under user preferences for the gradual rollout.

Naoko Komura
User Experience Programs

Our very positive revenue perspective (we have already exceeded our fundraising targets for the fiscal year, and received a very generous $2M grant from Google) allows us to do something we’ve hoped to be able to do: make our investment in user experience (see original press release) permanent.

It makes obvious sense for any major website to have a permanent team focused on user experience improvements in the broadest sense. This includes eliminating obvious barriers to entry, but beyond that, we want to improve the experience as a whole for both readers and editors.

We’re now referring to this work as “user experience” (UX) work, which includes usability.

Naoko Komura will be Head of UX Programs, while Trevor Parscal will be the lead front-end developer on the team. Congratulations to both of them. :-) Naoko is currently assessing the remaining contracts and will share further information as these decisions are finalized.

In the immediate future post-April, we’ll be concerned with tying up loose ends from the usability initiative, and finishing functionality that we had to put in the parking lot. We’ll work on a roadmap and staffing plan for 2010-11 and beyond as part of our business planning process.

Our long-term focus will be determined in significant part based on the recommendations from the strategic planning process; see especially the community health recommendations.

While we haven’t finalized priorities, the single biggest piece of work is likely going to be the transition to a rich-text editor as the default editing environment for all Wikimedia Foundation wikis, particularly Wikipedia. But, user experience to us also means assessing how people self-organize and communicate in Wikimedia projects, how they get stuff done, and how they read and navigate our projects. Even among the areas of work we’ve already identified, there’s enough to keep us busy for many years. :-)

Please note that the original usability initiative hasn’t concluded yet. The team is working on its final release, which will include some of the most-anticipated changes, including collapsing of templates to simplify the editing interface, and the production release of the new feature-set to all users. As always, we’ll continue to communicate progress through this blog and the tech blog, and feedback and participation is welcome at http://usability.wikimedia.org/.

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation