-------- Message original --------
Sujet: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Proposal: build    a    wiki    literature    
review    wiki-style
De : Reid Priedhorsky <r...@reidster.net>
Pour : wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org
Date : March-24-11 11:53:05 AM
On 3/23/11 2:56 PM, Chitu Okoli wrote:
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.
Sorry, Reid; I misunderstood you. I should have said so in my last post, but I certainly do agree 
with you that it would dilute the usefulness of the articles if they were all written to be 
accessible to "laypeople"; this kind of simplification would not be as useful to many 
researchers. I agree that a good solution would be to have the main summary or description written 
for researchers (who would be the primary audience), but also to include a "For 
laypeople" section, so that if anyone is inclined to rewrite the main summary for a more 
general audience, they could do so without affecting the more technical 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).
Wow, I don't know what he was thinking, but I guess Kai figured that displaying 
the power of Photoshop art was more important than usability! Maybe I should 
keep this example for the UI design portion of my systems design class :-)
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.
Actually, the controls seem to me to be quite similar to the standard Wikipedia 
layout. For example, look at 
http://acawiki.org/Measuring_user_influence_in_Twitter:_The_million_follower_fallacy.
 The page edit controls are on the top of the article, and the navigation bar 
is on the left, all very similar to Wikipedia. Since these key functional 
elements are very similar to the default, I assumed that your comments had more 
to do with the aesthetic elememts. Could you perhaps point out some specific 
differences in the core MediaWiki functionality elements that you think might 
confuse new users who are familiar with editing Wikipedia?

Actually, another reason for my comments is that I would assume that the core 
audience of contributors (academic researchers who are willing to share their 
research summaries online) would not have trouble trying to learn how to edit, 
even if AcaWiki used something other than MediaWiki. Other user categories 
(such as academic researchers who are hesitant to release their contributions 
as CC-BY) might be less tech-savvy, but I assume that those who are willing to 
contribute to Internet resources are generally sufficiently Internet-literate 
enough to learn any simple wiki language. However, like you, I have no 
citations to back this up; this is just my assumption.

~ Chitu
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