Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Future projects
Rough ideas that the Wikipedia Usability Project could tackle next.
Village Pump
[edit]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
[edit]History pages don't exactly have the clearest interface in the world.
Problems
[edit]- "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
[edit]- Use a table format.
Recent changes and watchlists
[edit]- 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
[edit]- Special:Upload
- Eep! Information overload (but has recently got better).
- A wizard-like UI for users to establish the correct license?
Preferences
[edit]- Special:Preferences
- Already had a bit of a redesign, but preferences need better sorting.
Edit forms
[edit]- MediaWiki:Edittools
- Too many buttons, options and text below edit box.
- Just scattered together, not designed.
- Too easy to choose the wrong button.
Specialpages
[edit]- 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
[edit]- 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.