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.

The Usability Team is preparing a supplemental release which will bring more stability and functionality to the features of their Babaco release, which has been available to logged in users of Wikimedia sites since October 2009. Among the changes which have been made are many improvements in interactivity and aesthetics, but the most critical change is using an HTML iframe element together with a special design mode that modern browsers support, in favor of the previous HTML textarea. This paves the way for developing a rich editing experience with collapsible templates and syntax highlighting, as well as provides a foundation on which a WYSIWYG editor may eventually be built upon.

The table of contents, which now features controls for expanding, collapsing and resizing, is also much more accurate than before. The link dialog which once had a tabbed interface for making internal or external links now intelligently detects the type of link you are making, an improvement we designed and prototyped while literally watching users struggle with the software during usability testing. Finally, there is now support for language specific icons in the toolbar, with a several languages ready to go such as German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Polish. This feature allows us to provide a more native experience by using language specific mnemonics. So far we’ve applied this feature to the bold and italic buttons, which are now B and I for English, F and K for German and G and C for Spanish. Languages without customized icons will continue using A and A.

The team will be deploying these upgrades in the coming days. To learn more about the Wikipedia Usability Initiative, check out their website at http://usability.wikimedia.org.

Preview of the second set of usability features, Babaco, are available through user preferences. The first feature is the article outline in the right hand side of the editing area. The outline updates itself in real-time as you type the headers in the articles and provides links which when clicked will jump you to the start of each section in the article. The second feature is the assisted way to insert links and tables. Instead of inserting wiki syntax, a dialogue box pops up when you hit the link icon in the toolbar. For internal links, link suggest features offers auto-complete options and validate the existence of articles. A click of the table icon in the toolbar will also assist define the number of rows and columns without modifying table rows and columns in the wiki syntax. Thirdly, new search and replace dialogue is added to the advanced toolbar. These features are released in the stealth mode, which means users need to turn them on by going to user preferences. To enable these features, please go to “My Preferences”, select ‘Editing’ tab and enable the features listed under ‘Experimental features’. We, the usability team, is still refining look and feel, but we wanted to invite active users to start using these features and provide us feedback.
Known Issues: Accuracy of cursor positions using the article outline feature (aka Navigable Table of Contents) degrades in long articles and significant so if you use Firefox. We are also still working on the display issue of NTOC in Firefox2 on Vista. Bug 20669
The release details and discussion can be found in the Babaco discussion page of the usability project wiki. Looking forward to receiving your feedback.

Naoko Komura, Project Manager, Usability Initiative

Navigable Table of Contents

Inserting link using link dialogue

Screenshot of Navigable Table of Contents

As brion’s earlier post stated, the new set of usability features (nickname: Babaco)are integrate into the source code but disabled until these features are stable.  New features include, navigable table of contents and content generation dialogues for links, tables, search and replace.  These features are currently staged on the usability prototype environment, and you are welcome to check them out and encouraged to push them hard to find bugs. :-)

We are also hoping to integrate add-media-wizard created by Michael Dale in Babaco. While API to extend the toolbar is being worked on, media import functionality can be played at the usability sandbox environment. Click the “Edit” tab and click an image gallery icon in the toolbar.  You will see a nice media import function there.  Feel free to create an article and import image from Commons using this neat feature.

Browser compatibility matrix for Babaco is found here. As always, share your thoughts and experience through the usability wiki.  Feedback on Babaco goes this discussion page.

Naoko Komura, Project Manager, Usability Initiative