Our CTO Brion Vibber offered a fascinating post on the Foundation’s Tech Blog today, highlighting the incredible traffic spike and related problems caused by the news of singer Michael Jackson’s reported death.
Expect the tech blog to be updated as other server developments unfold, and of course the Wikipedia article to go through some fascinating evolution and discussion.
Jay Walsh, Communications
The usability team has been translating the usability study into a new design and software for the last four weeks. The current focus is to implement easy improvement to overall usage of Wikipedia with the focus of editing interface in the next three months. The proposed skin by the usability team, Vector, will have streamlined tab layout, so that users will not lose the state of reading or editing whether in articles or in discussion pages.
Another usability improvement we are working on is the action-grouped toolbar, which hides the overwhelming number of tool icons which are not being used by novice users, but they are available for power users in the expanded mode. Lots of clutters will be removed from the editing interface.
You can see some of design mock-ups from our project page. Some of these proposed design concepts will be staged at the prototype environments this month and for any future improvements. (The action-based tool bar will not be seen on prototypes till June 8.)
If all goes well, these new features will be available from a user preference configuration early July. In the subsequent release in August, additional navigation aids are in the plan. We will be sharing the product feature at our project page in coming weeks. We look forward to your feedback.
Naoko Komura
The Wikipedia Usability Team
The Wikipedia Usability Initiative has extended the application deadline for the Software Developer position till May 30th. We are recruiting two candidates for this position. Both local applicants to the San Francisco Bay Area and remote applicants are encouraged to apply. Please help spread the word.
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Job_openings/Software_Developer_(project)
Naoko Komura
Wikipedia Usability Initiative
In February, the Wikimedia Foundation ran a survey with support from the Public Library of Science to explore the attitudes and beliefs of the open access scientific community with regard to Wikipedia. The open access movement is dedicated to the free dissemination of scientific knowledge. PLoS and other open access journals publish scientific papers under permissive Creative Commons licenses that allow anyone to download and re-use content. The Wikipedia article about open access, which itself could use some improvement, goes into more detail.
At Wikimedia, we’ve been thinking for a while about ways to directly work with scientists and open access journals. While scientists already contribute to Wikipedia in a self-organized manner (an example being the Gene Wiki effort), we have never made a systematic, large-scale effort to invite them to participate. Our exploratory survey indicates that such an invitation would be welcomed with open arms.
The survey was published on the PLoS website, blog, newsletter and Twitter feed, and the link to the survey was also more widely circulated, most notably in Peter Suber’s open access newsletter. 1,743 self-selected respondents completed the survey. Out of the respondents, 225 identified as PLoS authors. The subsample of authors did not differ remarkably from the general response. In general, respondents expressed a very favorable (58.98%) and somewhat favorable (32.19%) opinion of Wikipedia, and 87.73% indicated they used Wikipedia frequently or occasionally as part of their professional work.
71.03% of respondents supported some form of hyperlinks from open access publications to Wikipedia, and 91.51% supported links from Wikipedia to open access publications. 67.93% of respondents indicated support for large scale efforts to invite scientists to become Wikipedia contributors, and 24.73% indicated support for limited experiments. 81.82% responded they would participate in such an effort to improve Wikipedia, with roughly half of the respondents indicating they would only do so as part of their professional work.
While the survey is by no means scientific (in spite of the subject of study, it wasn’t intended to be), it indicates that efforts to reach out to more scientists as potential contributors to Wikipedia would be met with enthusiasm and support, particularly in the open access scholarly community. We’ve had some initial conversations specifically with the Public Library of Science, and are looking forward to continuing them, specifically with an eye to scalable approaches to future collaboration.
More information:
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
The Wikipedia Usability Team has finished up their analysis of the User Experience and Usability Testing conducted this past March with Bolt | Peters! As noted, please expect a full report on our project page soon. While we are getting all of our i’s dotted and t’s crossed, we wanted to share with you some of the major themes and findings & successes and failures.
Outstanding
“Usually it’s the most information in the easiest spot to access. It always looks very well put together….it boggles my mind how many people can contribute and it still looks like an encyclopedia.” – ‘Galen’
“I like Wikipedia because it’s plain text and nothing flashes” – ‘Claudia’
“It’s always one of the first hits on Google” – ‘Grace’
If there was one thing that was consistent and unanimous across our study participants, it was the assessment that Wikipedia is an incredibly valuable information resource whose accessibility is unparalleled. Aside from its value as a reference, a time and lifesaver, and an up to the minute news resource, participants also praised it’s simplicity, coherence, and breadth. Also, an extra thanks to Google, for showcasing just how referenced Wikipedia articles are – consistently making their links one of the top hits – our users count on that!
Room for Improvement
“Rather than making a mess, I’d rather take some time to figure out how to do it right.” – ‘Dan’
“Where are the rules?……I don’t really want to read all of this other stuff about what I”m supposed to do.” – ‘Grace’
All of our participants are Wikipedia readers, but had little or no experience with editing. Generally the editing process was not a warm and welcoming one. Before subjects even hit the ‘edit’ or ‘edit this page’ buttons, they voiced concerns about the rules, proper etiquette, formatting, and were naturally conscientious of and inhibited by maintaining the community expectations. When a few of them attempted to find answers to their questions about rules and etiquette, they were overwhelmed with the amount of information and documentation they encountered.
“ [I felt] kind of stupid.” – ‘Galen’
“It looks all jumbled and crazy…I’m going down to the stuff that looks like it makes sense.” – ‘Tito’
“I’m not a programmer. I know the letters PHP.” – ‘Seamus’
Once within the editing environment, most subjects commented on the illegibility of the hybrid Wiki syntax and article content – the more complex the article, the more exaggerated the response. When users made it past their initial reactions, navigating around the syntax to perform basic word processing tasks (correcting a typo, inserting a block of text, bold and italics formatting) proved less problematic than finding a particular section, adding references, using tables, creating and naming links. But not even our youngest and most computer savvy participants accomplished these tasks with ease.
“It’d be nice to have a GUI, so you could see what you’re editing. You’ve made these changes and you’re looking at it, and you don’t know how it’s going to look on the page. It’s a little clumsy to see how it’s going to look.” – ‘Bryan’
“On a blog it looks like the real page when you look at it. I have a hard time looking at this and going back to the way it actually is. I’m trying to correlate what’s on the real page.” – ‘Saurab’
Aside from feeling confused by the “code”, “computer lingo”, and “html”, subjects could not correlate what they were seeing within the edit box to what they saw on the article page. Most subjects opened a separate browser window to view the static article as they were making their changes and used preview and save before they had finished their work to monitor their editing progress and results.
Fail
“[This is] where I’d give up.” – ‘Shaun’
“ There sure is a lot of stuff to read.” – ‘Dan’
Yes, we can admit it. In some ways it seems, we are failing our users. The tasks that users most often failed to accomplish were adding references, creating a new article, and successfully finding help. When adding references, users questioned where and how to enter their sources. Once they established a location, they struggled with both the interface and the complex wiki syntax. Several users, while scanning pages to try to figure out how to create a new article, saw ‘create a book’ and thought “add a wiki page” was what they were looking for. In both adding references and new articles, some users consulted help. Help proved to be quite a labyrinth, where the cheat sheet was one source of shining light.
Check out this highlight video (in English only for now) on Commons:
Editing Wikipedia Makes Me Feel Stupid
Explain the Editing Process to Me
I Can’t Tell What This Really Looks Like
Though we cannot tackle the full scope of issues that our study participants brought up, brought to our attention, and validated, it was an eye-opening and learning experience for the whole team. The study informs us as we take a further look at the most effective changes we can make to lower these barriers for potential Wikipedia editors. We look forward to sharing our complete report and initial ideas with you – stay tuned!
Parul, Wikimedia Usability Initiative
It’s my pleasure to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation has signed a strategic mobile and web partnership with Orange. Orange is one of the leading wireless and broadband internet providers in the world, and with this agreement we’ll begin integrating trademarked Wikipedia content onto their mobile and web channels. This is not just a way for me to improve my French (although that does need a lot of work. . .) – we’re also working with Orange to co-develop content channels and think about new ways to innovate and expand access to free knowledge. We’ve developed a QA as well dealing with aspects of the partnerships.
This is great news for Orange’s 175 million mobile customers and web users, as they’ll get better access to Wikipedia’s trove of knowledge throughout their daily lives. We’re starting out in the UK, Poland, Spain and France with plans to work together throughout Orange’s European footprint. This gets Wikipedia knowledge in front of more people in new ways, which helps us in our mission to expand knowledge to more people in more places. I especially want to praise all the volunteers who’ve made Wikipedia the world’s leading information resource. This partnership will help showcase their important work in front of more people than ever before.
I’ve been negotiating with Orange for a while, and I have been consistently impressed by their dedication to the Foundation’s mission of spreading free knowledge. They appreciate the importance of our community in everything we do, they’re committed to supporting neutral point-of-view, and they have an increasing interest in open source technology. The Foundation is always interested in business partnerships which understand our culture and help expand our mission, and Orange is an ideal partner for us.
This is an important new revenue stream to build on our successful fundraising campaigns. All the proceeds will go toward Wikimedia Foundation projects, with an emphasis on organizational sustainability and new services to make Wikipedia and our other projects better and easier to use. We’re a very lean nonprofit organization—just 27 of us help maintain the fourth-biggest website in the world—and this partnership will help us better support the vibrant community that makes Wikipedia possible.
Please join me in welcoming Orange as a new partner supporting the Wikimedia community!
Kul Wadhwa, Business Development<
From late October to early November 2008, the Wikimedia Foundation and UNU-Merit conducted the first multilingual survey of Wikipedia readers and contributors in 20 languages. In total, more than 130,000 Wikipedia readers and contributors completed the extensive survey questionnaire (out of more than 300,000 people total who took at least part of the questionnaire).* This level of response far exceeded our expectations, and the data that was collected provides a wealth of information about the Wikipedia community. English, German and Spanish were the most responsive Wikipedia editions and together make up two thirds of the responses.
The UNU-Merit team has spent the previous months cleaning and preparing the data, and is now making available first results for some of our priority questions. Key outcomes of this first analysis include:
Ruediger Glott and Philipp Schmidt from UNU-Merit have made available additional data in the online workbook of their analysis (PDF file), and we’re planning to give you regular updates with new data every couple of weeks from now on. The survey team also maintains its own website at wikipediastudy.org.
This is a landmark moment in the history of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia movement. These and future findings that will result from this data will help to shape our efforts to reach new contributors and new readers. The Wikimedia Foundation wishes to thank everyone who has made this survey possible, especially the UNU-Merit Team and the community of translators.
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
* In addition to the 130,000 responses overall, we’ve received 40,000 responses from the Russian Wikipedia, which very significantly overrepresents this group in the total response set. The survey team has excluded this group from the data until the possible causes for this overrepresentation can be fully understood.
[UPDATE 4/16] Naoko Komura, who project-managed the survey translation and launch on the Wikimedia Foundation side, sent a list of translators who helped us to run this survey in 20 languages. They are: Jeandré du Toit, Mohamed Magdy, Meno25, Toni Pulido, Jordi Roqué Figuls, Xavier SMP, Zirland, MF-Warburg, Tim Landscheidt, Michael Bimmler, Arno Lagrange, Ariel T. Glenn, Ziko van Dijk, Verónica Rivero, Salvador Espada, Sébastien Beyou, Plyd, Delphine Ménard, Philippe Verdy, Daniel U. Thibault, Maximilian Hasler, Rex Alberto, Morris Mastini, Federico Leva, Hatukanezumi, Henrdrik Maryns, Robin P., Wojciech Pędzich, McMonster, Jennifer Hobbs, Thomas Buckup, Aleksandr Sigachov, Ilya Haykinson, Mayooranathan Ratnavelupillai, BalaSundaraRaman, C.R. Selvakumar, Manop Kaewmoracharoen, Nguyễn Thanh Quang, Trần Vĩnh Tân, Ting Chen, Andrew Leung. Thanks to all of them for their help — it’s wonderful to have so much volunteer support in a project like this. Thanks also to Naoko herself, who helped to create the Japanese translation, and to the UNU-Merit webmasters, Herman Pijpers and Mourik Jan Heupink. :-)<
The usability team, and Bolt|Peters, a user experience research firm in San Francisco, conducted a usability study from March 24th to March 26th. The objective of this study was to identify common interface barriers new editors face by asking participants to conduct simple editing tasks in Wikipedia.
We conducted two types of studies: in-person and remote. Ten participants (three are pictured at the right), who were selected based on their experience level of editing Wikipedia, age group, and gender, were invited to the lab for a one hour study and an interview. Five participants were recruited in real time from the Wikipedia site for remote testing. We asked them to conduct the same tasks we did for in-person study.
The analysis of the results is currently underway, and Parul will be releasing the summary on our project page soon.
One thing I want to share with you before the summary is available is that we received lots of kudos and love from our participants about Wikipedia. People just love Wikipedia. :-)
Naoko Komura, Program Manager of the Wikipedia Usability Initiative
A few media stories circulated today suggesting that English Wikipedia’s main page was a model example of a spoof/fake page in the spirit of on-line shenanigans. In fact (no pun intended), there’s nothing fake or foolish about it.
According to Mark Pellegrini, long-time coordinator of the English Wikipedia front page, since 2007 Wikipedia has been running a tongue-in-cheek, but truthful smattering of wild articles on the first day of April:
Back in 2004/2005, the place was a mad-house come April fools. Highly respected people, even admins, would create fake articles. Then other people would discover them, delete the articles, and block the creators, etc. In short, come April 1, the place would go crazy.
As the person who chooses the featured articles, I was dragged into the mess. In 2005 and 2006, as a compromise, I choose the silliest featured articles I could find (Nintendo and Spoo, respectively). In 2007, Pharos had a genius idea — to feature [[George Washington (inventor)]] — and write up the main page blurb as if it were describing the actual George Washington. Everything in the blurb was absolutely true, but *a lot* of people were fooled.
Thus, a new tradition was born, which worked out well in 2008 (Ima Hogg) and this year (Museum of Bad Art). Now the true-but-sounds-like-an-obvious-hoax philosophy seems to taken root as the de-facto policy for the day.
Thus proving it’s possible to be a fact-focussed, NPOV Wikipedian and have a solid sense of humor.
See you at the MOBA!
Jay Walsh, Communications<
Yesterday we activated the wiki-to-print feature (see our recent blog post) in six additional Wikipedia language editions: French, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple English. In these language editions, it’s now possible to make collections of Wikipedia articles, share them, download them as PDF and OpenDocument files, or order them as printed books. We specifically activated it in the Simple English edition (which is a version of Wikipedia written in simple terms for children and adults learning English) so that English language users can get a first good feel for the functionality in a Wikipedia environment (it’s been active in English Wikibooks for a while). We’re hoping for a roll-out in additional languages including English very soon; our main concern is scalability of the feature under the massive load of the English Wikipedia.
The feature has been quickly embraced where it has been activated. In the German Wikipedia, since our deployment on January 27, more than 1,000 custom selections have been created and saved. Our technology partner, PediaPress, has been highly responsive to the rapidly accumulating feedback, and many small and larger output issues have been fixed in the last two weeks. For the new deployments, there’s a central feedback page on Meta.
It will be interesting to see how this feature affects writing on Wikipedia. When people start to think about their contributions in the context of a book, having a consistent structure and style is even more important than when viewing separate Wikipedia articles in a browser. Beyond increasing the quality and reach of our content, we also hope that this technology will be valued by our existing volunteer community as a way to turn their contributions into something that can be touched, held, given away — and by new writers as a motivation to participate.
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
(UPDATE 2/27: We’ve enabled it in the English Wikipedia for signed in users and are observing server load and user feedback. If you’re logged in, see the help page for more information on how to use the tool. As always, the PediaPress team is amazingly responsive to issues that people encounter, and we expect continued improvements to the PDF and print quality over the coming weeks and months. If all goes well, we plan to deploy it on all relevant projects for all users in March. Language support in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hebrew and some other languages still needs to improve and we won’t enable it in languages that the tool can’t handle appropriately yet – code contributions are welcome!)
Your donation will support Wikipedia and its sister projects (see planned spending) and is tax-deductible in the United States.
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