Ed Chi, Principal Scientist, Area Manager of Augmented Social Cognition(ASC) at Palo Alto Research Center is a prominent pioneer in social computing and a prolific researcher in the underlying mechanisms in online social systems such as Wikipedia and social tagging sites. Ed gave the keynote talk on Modeling Social Media at the Hypertext 2010 conference a few days ago.

Last October, I had the privilege to share the panel with Ed at BayCHI, where he presented the findings from his joint research, “The Singularity is Not Near: Slowing Growth of Wikipedia”. In addition to the discussion about the possible reasons behind the slow growth, Ed described Wikipedia as “knowledge-ware”, “people-ware” and “tool-ware” in his presentation. This prompted me to reflect on the focus beyond the Wikipedia Usability Initiative. The objective of the Wikipedia Usability Initiative supported by Stanton Foundation was to improve the usability of the editing tools for novice editors.

I had been struggling with competing priorities. Often times investing in future opportunities was postponed due to immediate problems. When the Stanton Wikipedia Usability Initiative approached its project end, I visited Ed with Erik Zachte and Howie Fung to discuss the next user experience endeavor of how to make Wikipedia a more social place. Ed shared his wisdom and suggested to focus on optimizing resources rather than focusing on growth. Growth cannot be expected when resources are not optimized. We also need to know how resources are allocated before optimizing them.

WikiDashboard was developed by the ASC team almost three years ago. It is a great tool to provide dynamic visualization of Wikipedia editing activities. For example, you can see the editing activity of the relatively new article about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, by editor and number of edits over time, at a glance. You can also find out about edit activities by a certain editor by clicking the editors’ user name. Wikidashboard’s social transparency helps readers to see who is writing what, and editors can discover the most active contributors visually before diving into the details listed in the history page.

WikiDashboard in a Wikipedia article

Facebook implemented Community Pages, a concept of using articles as catalysts to connect people. Community Pages embed Wikipedia articles from the publicly available MediaWiki API into Facebook to connect people to their interests, and they create links inside the user’s profile. Facebook users can discover people with common interests whether they are in their friends network or not.

Wikimedia projects draw over 375 million unique visitors and roughly 100,000 editors edit articles more than five times monthly. Detailed monthly reports can be found here. This huge gap indicates that we are not succeeding in converting visitors to editors. It requires certain skills to write an encyclopedia article, so connecting people over the same interests can be a first step to introduce new contributors into the existing Wikimedia editor community.

Wikimedia projects are about collecting knowledge to share with everyone on the planet. Connecting people with similar interests can help enrich both the reading and the editing experience of this process.

Naoko Komura, Head of User Experience Programs

We’d like to thank users for all the feedback and comments about the new user interface which was enabled to English Wikipedia on May 13, 2010. The summary of feedback will be published soon.

I’d like to address a few of the points you’ve made here: a lot of you reported that the location of the search field is disorienting and it should be placed back at the left navigation bar. We understand your frustration when something you use every day is moved around and you have to get used to the new location. The decision to move the search from the left navigation bar to the top-right hand corner was made based on the usability study.  Study participants interacted with Wikipedia’s search over the browser’s search a lot more frequently when it was placed in the right-hand corner. We are looking at the volume of search queries to monitor how this change is affecting the overall users, and we will publish the findings in a couple of weeks.

We had a few problems with the behavior of the search system during the first week, which was unfortunate. It went through numerous bug fixes and updates, and it should be stable now. We hope you find the new search interaction intuitive and easy to use. We are still looking for a way to expand the search field without compromising the space for tab navigation interaction, which is crucial user flow for both readers and editors.

Within the two week time period after the new interface was introduced to English Wikipedia, we observed approximately 18,000 users returning to the previous Wikipedia interface, called “monobook”. There are about 137,000 unique users who had some activities in Recent changes including account creation. Roughly 87,000 users either edited, uploaded files, or conducted administrative task during the same period. The opt-out rate is estimated from 13% to 22% depending on whether user creation is included as a user activity. This aligns with the opt-out rate of the beta program, but we hope to continue to incorporate the needs of various user groups, such as readers, casual editors, active editors, and administrators.

The roll-out of the new Wikipedia interface has so far only taken place on the English version of Wikipedia, just one of over 250 distinct Wikipedias in other languages.

As a next step, we are preparing for the interface switch of the following nine languages, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Russian, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Dutch. The translation of the software for those languages is ready, thanks to the volunteer translators of translatewiki.net. We do have quite a bit of translation work to be completed and we want to recruit user experience ambassadors who will help the user experience team to communicate to the language communities effectively and understand the language specific needs and feedbacks. If you are willing to take part this role, please contact us here. We are targeting to make this switch happen in the week of June 7th.

Thanks,

Naoko Komura, Head of User Experience Programs

(Update 2: The search interface was updated on May 20. This update addresses the problems where search query is truncated under some circumstances, and the problem that search suggestion is cut-off. Thank you for your prompt feedback.)

(Update: We have received problem reports and feedback that search queries were truncated sometimes and the search suggestions were hard to read due to the limited width. In order to mitigate the problem, the new search function was disabled and the search field was increased by fifty percent. We also have updated the new search interface which we are currently staging on the prototype. This updates address the reported issues such as truncation of search queries and the problems that search suggestions are cut-off. Prototypes in various languages are also available here. Please try it out and let us know your feedback. Thanks!)

Wikipedia has some new improvements, thanks to the hard work and dedication of over half a million beta testers and volunteers who worked with the Wikimedia User Experience team over the last year!  With a beta testing group of 635,000 people and an 83% user retention rate, we’re proud to introduce you to Wikipedia’s new look and feel.  As of 8:00am UTC today, the new features moved from beta and will be available for everyone to use.  This is the first major initiative the Wikimedia Foundation and its volunteers have ever undertaken for Wikipedia’s interface. And there’s more to come.

It’s been one year since we began the usability initiative, and we’ve rolled out the new interface to Wikinews (English and Serbian), Wikimedia Commons, and now English Wikipedia. That means that hundreds of millions of people around the world will now experience an easier to use, and more importantly, easier to edit Wikipedia.  Our most recent interface launch, on Wikimedia Commons, was a great success with continued adoption by over 91% of Commons contributors. Over the next few weeks, the new interface will cascade to all language Wikipedias.

Here’s what’s new:

• Look and feel: We’ve introduced a new theme we call “Vector” which makes essential functions easier to find.
• Navigation: We’ve improved the navigation for reading and editing pages. Now, the tabs at the top of each page more clearly define whether you’re reading or editing a page. There’s also a collapsible navigation for the left sidebar that hides items that aren’t used often, but allows them to continue to be easily accessible.
  
• Editing improvements: We’ve reorganized the editing toolbar to make it easier to use. Now, formatting pages is simpler and more intuitive. And we’ve introduced a table wizard to make creating tables easier. You’ll also discover a new find and replace feature to simplify page editing.
• Link wizard: An easy-to-use tool allows you to add links to other pages on Wikipedia, or to pages on external sites.
• Search improvements: Search suggestions are now improved to get you to the page you are looking for more quickly.
• Pediapress book creator: Create a printed book by selecting Wikipedia articles and adding them to the Book Creator.  Your articles will be turned into a PDF (or OpenDocument) file so you can easily take Wikipedia wherever you go.
  
• Updated Puzzle globe and wordmark: The well-known Wikipedia globe and wordmark have been enhanced and improved. We’ve introduced Linux Libertine, an open source typeface to help support the creation of hundreds of localized Wikipedia wordmarks, and the internationally-recognized puzzle globe has been recreated in 3D and includes even more languages.  Read more from our recent blog post.
  

We kicked off this effort in April 2009, and immediately went to work to figure out how to make Wikipedia easier to use for everyone.  We started with usability testing among everyday readers with no editing experience, and we learned about the way people interact with Wikipedia and how we could make the experience better.  Using this valuable information, we incrementally released new features to users who opted into our beta testing group.  Over the next several months, we continued to improve the features based on feedback from both our beta testers and from usability studies we conducted.  We’re thankful for the input of thousands of international users and volunteers who gave us feedback on our progress.

Naoko Komura, Head of User Experience Programs

Following-up the announcement by the user experience team on March 25, the default user interface of Wikimedia Commons was switched to the new user interface on April 5th. The feedback from Commons users is found here. The majority of logged-in users of Commons continue using the new user interface, while about 9% of logged-in users switched back to the previous interface. After the switch was made to Commons, Ops team has determined that extra system resources is recommended for precautions as transitioning to the new interface while supporting the existing interface can tax the cache system severely. The new hardware is being installed, and we have a scheduled date for switching the user interface of English Wikipedia.

The default interface switch of English Wikipedia will take place at 5:00am UTC on May 13. The deployment process is expected to last for two to three hours.

Maintainer of user scripts, style customization and gadgets are recommended to review the previous post that describes the impact of these changes on bots, scripts, and gadgets interfacing with Wikimedia projects

We are building a frequently-asked-questions page. Will you help to compile the topics you find missing by posting topic ideas to the discussion page? We want to make sure that we provide answers to anticipated questions.

We plan to conduct wider outreach about the upcoming changes to our global user base in the coming week, which would likely include press outreach, blogging, and developing more public-friendly questions and answers. We’ll share more info soon on the Wikimedia blog.

Thank you for your interest,

Naoko Komura
User Experience Programs

Here’s a quick update on how users of Wikimedia Commons (the image repository for Wikipedia and our other projects) responded to the usability improvements and user interface changes which took place earlier this month on April 5.

The new interface was introduced to anonymous users and users whose skin setting was set to default (MonoBook, the style that’s still visible on Wikipedia) at the time of the switch. About 10,600 users had been logged in sometime between when the switch happened on April 5th and April 14 th, a little over a one week period. We observed about 1,000 users switched back to the previous default skin, MonoBook, which represents about 9% of logged in users for the same time period. These numbers are still preliminary as we need to monitor for at least for a month to compare with the editor activity statistics for Commons.

We are processing the feedback and plan to publish it soon, but here are a few of the most frequently expressed feedback.

Q: Where did the watch/unwatch tab go?

A: The Watch/Unwatch tab is now the tab with the star as seen in the image below. Watch/Unwatch was once in the drop-down menu, but since the early beta feedback indicated that it is frequently used task, it was moved up to the top tab navigation. The star is used to minimize the tab width. For languages such as German and Greek, whose words tend to be long, the screen real-estate for tabs is limited. And using the star is one way to provide an universal solution.

Q: Why don’t my tools and scripts work any more?

A: Although the user experience team had reached out to the script writers and gadget writers in advance through blogs and messages via Village Pump, it takes a while for all scripts to be compatible with the new skin, Vector. We’re working on many of these features now.

Q: MonoBook was working fine for me, why change?
Multiple usability studies revealed that new editors with little or no experience in editing Wikimedia projects have a hard time navigating to get to the article and apply a simple formatting edit. The new usability improvements bring a simplified approach in navigation, the expandable toolbar depending on your edit tasks, built-in help systems, easy-to-find special characters, and wizards to add links and and tables. By making the editing experience easy, the hurdles to join Wikimedia projects will be lowered. By inviting more editors to Wikimedia projects, it will increase the potential quality the articles. Thus our ecosystem gets healthier.

Q: How do I switch back?

A: Follow the “New!” link, and go to “Take me back” section. You can also change your settings under appearance and editing in your user preferences.

Lastly, ArséniureDeGallium created a new Userbox template called “User Vector skin” for users who like Vector. Steven Walling ported it to English Wikipedia. The exact schedule of the switch for English Wikipedia is still to be determined, but it is likely sometime in May. We will send out update as the plan finalizes.

(UPDATE The survey feedback as of April 21 is available here.)

Naoko Komura, Head of User Experience Programs

An update from the user experience team …

Wikimedia Commons, the multimedia repository with over six million assets, has a brand new user interface and navigation today. This is the first roll out of the usability improvements to Wikimedia projects after English Wikinews and Wikimedia Strategic Planning adopted the usability beta as default interface during its early beta phase.

The highlight of improvements are:

• 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 simpler 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.

(The multimedia user experience team is currently working to simplify the upload process and the new upload process will be available later this year.)

The details of the improvements can be found at our blog post from March 25.

We hope you find the new interface intuitive and easy to navigate.[1] If the new interface does not work out for you and if you prefer to stick to the classic look and feel, follow the “New!” link on the top of the page and go to the “Take me back!” section.

Our next roll-out is English Wikipedia. We are planning to introduce the new interface and navigation design to English Wikipedia towards the end of April.

Thank you for your interest,

Naoko Komura, Project Manager, User Experience

[1] The new toolbar is currently not supported in Internet explorer 8.

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, Project Manager, User Experience 

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.