On 3/23/11 2:56 PM, Chitu Okoli wrote: > > Actually, I feel grad student summaries are an excellent contribution. > Although they might not be perfect, grad student seminar assignments > would probably be the largest single source of stub articles. Multiply > that by every academic field that requires grad students to summarize > articles, and I think promoting the wiki as an outlet for grad student > work would be the single most effective strategy to make it huge in just > one or two years. I, for one, very much see grad students as a major > contributing community.
Oh, I definitely agree that grad student contributions are tremendously valuable! (especially having been on until very recently) My point was this: that writing for a lay audience and writing for fellow researchers (grad students included) are different tasks, and mixing them leads to reduced value for each audience. I am fine with each paper having a "for laypeople" and "for researchers" section to the summary. >> Right; what I meant was that while AW does use MW it doesn't *look like* >> it does, and that's a barrier to entry, which matters. The default skin >> needs to look more like default MediaWiki. > > Actually, I don't agree with Reid on this point. Appearance is very much > a subjective issue. Here's my purely subjective opinion: > * I find it irritating that hundreds or thousands of MediaWiki instances > all look like Wikipedia, as if MediaWiki didn't didn't have any skinning > flexibility. (I'm assuming that when Reid says "look like the default > MediaWiki", what he effectively means is "look like Wikipedia"; Reid, > please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you.) > * I like the AcaWiki interface; I wouldn't want to change it to look > like Wikipedia. > > Less subjectively, I don't think that the appearance is a significant > barrier to entry. Saying, "It works just like Wikipedia" should do the > job fine to communicate the familiarity of the wiki language. My concern is less with aesthetics than what the interface looks like it does (the "apparent affordances" to use some jargon). As an analogy, I'm sure many of you have encountered Java and Flash applications which have all the same GUI widgets (buttons, scroll bars, etc.) as native OS apps, but they look slightly different. Obviously one can overcome the differences, but unfamiliarity makes the apps harder to use and turns off newbies (or even experienced people who are sick of the "specialness"). (Kai's Power Tools is a classic offender in this regard - where are the controls in this screen shot and how do you use them? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kai%27s_Power_Tools.jpg). I could certainly be wrong, but this is professional rather than personal opinion, as someone with an HCI education. Sorry for the lack of citations. I do agree that aesthetics is to some degree subjective. I don't necessarily believe that we need it to be the standard MW look in all respects (though I personally like the consistency), but the wiki controls need to be consistent with other MW installs (most importantly, Wikipedia) so people can see easily that it's a wiki and in particular one they've used before. Reid -- I work for IBM, and sending this e-mail might be part of my job. However, I speak for myself only, not the company. _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
