Making MediaWiki friendly
Just before the New Year, I was in a round-table discussion with Andrew Lih and Liam Wyatt over at Wikipedia Weekly. We talked about a lot of things, but the first bit of it was by far my favorite bit. We got into a rather extensive discussion about usability (specifically the Stanton Grant) and the problems MediaWiki faces in this area. Specifically, I’d like to go into more details about the wiki markup.
Back in 2005, I began contributing to Wikipedia. One of the reasons I began to work on the project was my love for the free/open source, with free/open content being a natural extension of that. The second reason was because it was ridiculously easy. The markup was still (relatively) simple at the time and presented no major barrier to contribution. Since then, we’ve seen Wikipedia grow massively, and MediaWiki had to grow with it. ParserFunctions have since arrived, as have many other additions to the markup. I’ve never learned ParserFunctions; I can’t memorize template parameters. Asking our newbies to do this is unrealistic, and puts an insurmountable barrier in the way of their contribution.
Part of the problem is a lack of WYSIWYG (as has been blogged many times by many people). This comes back to the fact that the wiki markup A) Has no formal grammar (see bug 7 and the Markup spec project), and B) Hasn’t grown in a manageable and predictable way. Over the years, more features and tags have been tacked on the side, as I said above. Hopefully the Stanton Grant will make a difference in these areas.
What problems do you have with using MediaWiki? What would you like to see easier to do?
Over at the blog for WikiProject Oregon (wikiprojectoregon.wordpress.com), I’ve written a couple posts about the Stanton grant and usability features I really like, mostly drawing on the ease of use that enterprise wikis have really perfected.
For experienced users, using templates (especially references) might be the most annoying. There is a nice gadget called VorlagenMeister (template master) on dewiki, which, surprisingly, didn’t really spread to other wikis (maybe due to the language barrier?), and refTools is also helpful, but there is still a long way to go. (Ideally, you should be able to enter a URL, and get back a fully formatted reference template; I plan to attempt something like that this spring.) Separating metadata from the article text would also be helpful; this should not be very hard with stuff that relates to the subject of the article (categories, infoboxes etc.), but for information related to the text of the article (ie. references) I don’t see how this could be possible. Stuff like Wikicite/WikiTextrose could be a huge hit if it can be done somehow, though.
Image uploading is also very hard, but that is mostly not a technical problem, copyright is just too complicated.
For beginners, markup in itself is the largest problem, I suppose. I don’t really believe in WYSIWYG, but intelligent syntax highlighting plus live preview plus a much better help might make a difference. Plus semi-WYSIWYG mini-editors for tables, templates, formulas – stuff that has a rigid, well-defined syntax that’s unlikely to change. Importing Word documents is also a must – WikEd already does a decent job there, but it has an interface that’s intimidating even for many regular users.