Hi all, thank you for your summary, Guillaume. I would like to add to this a question based on Jon's insightful email:
the research you did on clicks etc, was apparently only on the English Wikipedia. Would it be an option to first do more research on how the links are used on the other projects? Out of the >700 projects to choose from, you unfortunately picked one where the clicking is most likely to be very different from all the other projects. Usually that is not a good basis to build decisions for all 700 projects on. Besides that, it seems you measured logged in users (since you mention comparing monobook vs vector, it seems that you measured people who switched before the Big Switch?) Perhaps you want to actually do research on how anonymous users work. And to be honest, I find ~1% actually quite a *lot* for this kind of links. Considering the huge number of people who do not speak a language besides English, or who rather stay there because they started there for a reason (and why would you then go to the German article on Pocahontas if the English Wikipedia suits you well). Would it be an option to put the language links back to as they were for now, and then do some more research first on how people outside the English language behave, how anonymous users behave and have a discussion about that in the community first? Because I strongly believe this topic is *so* important to all the smaller languages (they draw their community from these links, after all), that we should involve that as well into the discussion. The links are not just there to help the specific visitors of the English Wikipedia, but they are there as well to help the tswana Wikipedia to develop over time to a serious size. Please remember that our mission is to bring the sum of human knowledge to *all* people in the whole world. Not just the readers of major languages. I do however recognize that linking the whole huge list might not be an optimal way of helping these communities, but I am not sure either that focusing on large and to the reader relevant languages will be. best regards, Lodewijk 2010/6/5 Guillaume Paumier <guillom....@gmail.com> > Howie, > > Thanks for your detailed message. I appreciate your efforts of trying > to listen to the feedback from the community. However, even after > listening to the discussion in the office today, and after reading > your message, I still fail to understand the logic behind these > decisions. I'm going to try and summarize your paragraphs into a few > sentences; please tell me if I got something wrong > > In a paragraph, you explain it is your belief that in Monobook, the > long list of languages made it difficult for the user to identify this > area as "a list of languages". > > In the following paragraph, you say you tracked the clicks in the > sidebar in Monobook, and found that less than 1% of users clicked on a > language link. You then explain you hid the list of languages because > this number showed it wasn't used. > > Perhaps I'm just beating a dead horse, but, looking at these two > arguments, a fairly reasonable hypothesis to make is that users don't > click on the languages links *because* they don't realize it's there. > A fairly reasonable design decision would be to try and make it more > discoverable, and you could measure the impact easily by seeing if > more users click on the language links. > > Instead, you chose to hide the list completely. I still fail to see > how this decision could be an attempt at fixing the issue you had > discovered. > > Maybe users don't think of a traffic jam as "a list of cars". But > showing an empty road hardly makes things better. > > -- > Guillaume Paumier > [[m:User:guillom]] > http://www.gpaumier.org > > _______________________________________________ > foundation-l mailing list > foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l > _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l