Wiki143:WikiProject Usability/Future projects

Rough ideas that the Wikipedia Usability Project could tackle next.

Village Pump

The Village Pump is an ugly, incomprehensible mess of tables and too much information.

• Proposals
  • Split it out to contain more info on if this forum is the place for you...
  • Add helpful Images to assist in navigation.
  • Put the "I want to..." section beneath the actual forum navigation.

History pages

History pages don't exactly have the clearest interface in the world.

Problems

• "cur" and "last" are not self-evident, and users have complained about them.
• Not obvious date links to the revision.
• Design falls apart when edit summaries wrap.
• Compare selected versions could probably have a better design.
• Paging is very poor.

Ideas

• Use a table format.

Recent changes and watchlists

• Recent changes and watchlists
• Both have similar issues to history pages, but are even more crowded in places.
• Design similar to MoinMoin's RecentChanges?

Upload form

• Special:Upload
• Eep! Information overload (but has recently got better).
• A wizard-like UI for users to establish the correct license?

Preferences

• Special:Preferences
• Already had a bit of a redesign, but preferences need better sorting.

Edit forms

• MediaWiki:Edittools
• Too many buttons, options and text below edit box.
• Just scattered together, not designed.
• Too easy to choose the wrong button.

Specialpages

• Special:Specialpages, a page linked everywhere has now become almost completely unusable. Usability guidelines recommend to order long lists in topics. Specialpages themselves sometimes explain what they do, but not all (see Special:MIMEsearch f.e.).
• Proposal: New design of Special:Specialpages, add explanations to all specialpages (software change necessary), add a link to related manual page if necessary, rethink content of the toolbox (necessary software change: make it configurable like MediaWiki:Sidebar)

Help pages

• Update and clarify all the Meta help pages, to fix the overlap/repetition with en: pages here (e.g. Help:Editing tips and tricks and Wikipedia:How to edit a page and Help:Wikitext examples all cover the same thing), and to help the foreign language editions that use meta as a basis for their own translation.