Wikipedia gets $890,000 for the Luddites

Anyone who's ever edited or created a Wikipedia entry can attest to the fact that it's not that self-explanatory. They're in luck--the nonprofit anyone-can-edit encyclopedia has received $890,000 from the Stanton Foundation in order to make it easier to use.

More specifically, the grant was given to the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that encompasses Wikipedia. It'll fund the hire of three new software developers in the foundation's San Francisco office. Then, per a press release, the team will "commission research to identify the most common barriers to entry for first-time writers, and then work to systematically reduce or eliminate them...hiding complex elements of the user interface from people who don't need them."

Wikipedia will make all new code open-source.

"Wikipedia attracts writers who have a moderate-to-high level of technical understanding, but it excludes lots of smart, knowledgeable people who are less tech-centric," Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner said in the release. "One of our key priorities is to attract those people and persuade them to help write and edit the encyclopedia. I am thrilled that the Stanton Foundation recognizes the importance of that work, and will be helping us with it."

Also a plus for a more user-friendly Wikipedia: Ideally, its millions of articles will have a broader depth of coverage. My colleague Declan McCullagh did an assessment last year of the skew toward geeky pop-culture content: the article for the mythological figure Vulcan, for example, is about one tenth as long as the article for the Vulcans of Star Trek fame.

The Stanton Foundation was founded by broadcast executive Frank Stanton, who served as president of CBS (which publishes CNET News) from 1946 to 1971.

[dcfemella]

Wikipedia is written by people, who are probably mainly geeks. How are they going to do this? The only way to do something like this would be to add readability statistics like MS Word has and force people to not go above a 9th-grade level. It really should be 6th and 7th, but I doubt some of the things can be written to those levels.

[phylum--2008]

They're not talking about content, they're talking about the usability of the interface for editing articles -- two completely different concepts. One does not depend on the other; believe it or not hundreds of generations of mankind, completely unaware of modern computing technology, created brilliant descriptive prose and in-depth taxonomizations of our world long before Wikipedia. Honest.

[humanssssss]

There are a few good writing interface that doesn't require the use of markups. This will dramatically reduce the barrier to entry for those who want to contribute.

[sanenazok]

Yeah finally...better quality is coming. I was looking for information on "Lymphocytic choriomeningitis" and the wikipedia page came up. Notably it had a technical mistake AND very little information other than which TV show the virus appeared on. Hey but if I was searching for information on some obscure anime or a dancing robot Internet meme then wikipedia would be the premier source with pages and pages written about it.

[elponderado]

This seems to me to be a misuse of the word Luddites. The Luddites weren't trying to simplify - just the opposite. They were trying to get rid of machinery that was simplifying jobs to the point of making them obsolete. And no one in this story is anti-tech. Am I missing something?

[JBSimmons]

Yes, before the llast new release, all special characters didn't work using the Wiki standards. Like symbols for trademarks and copyright. The only way it worked was in using DOS ALT+#### keystroke. Then came the new system and it's all gone, I wonder if they fixed it or was removed because Wiki still doesn't have a way of dsilaying symbols used in science and lega documents. I gave up on it for awhile. Even Wiki says to use ALT+#### keystrokes as in DOS for it. I don't see the proper symbols in use where they used to be yet. Sigh....

[jaxstephens]

All I have to say is, FINALLY! I love Wikipedia and use it almost every day. I've contributed periodically, but the interface for doing so has often kept me from bothering with it since it's so non-user friendly and inefficient. I don't understand why this is so hard and wasn't fixed years ago. Make it work like a Web 2.0 email editor, which in turn is just like a dumbed-down version of a word processor. Make it WYSIWYG, and eliminate the bizarre tags that display and get in the way of just plain writing something. (A toggled "Code View" or "Tag View" would still be okay, though.)

[thekohser]

Great! Just what we need -- even more editors on Wikipedia who have not developed the skills to work in a wiki mark-up environment that has (apparently) not proven too challenging for thousands of 15-year-olds. I'm sure the much-ballyhooed "quality" and "accuracy" of Wikipedia will be sure to go up now!

[morlamweb]

Your ignorance is astonishing. A working knowledge of the rather arcane syntax of Wiki markup (said as a longtime, though former, Wikipedia editor) does not preclude you from contributing valuable content to the encyclopedia. If those barriers can be taken down, so that real subject matter experts can contribute their knowledge, then so much the better.

[colamix]

moralweb your attitude is so becoming of a 'longtime Wikipedia editor". Until they've clicked on any history tab within Wikipedia, people don't realize what an utter fsuking fraud it is. A sham of disinformation perpetrated by anons and obsessed senior editors with too much time on their hands.

[dopkew]

I have the same concern as you, thekohser.

I had once tried to add some information to a wiki but was not able to because I couldn't understand how to. I gave it up as too much effort.
But I still fear that Wikipedia is vulnerable to vandalism and manipulation. I think security against this has to be upped several degrees (I don't know how) before it is made more editor friendly.

[thekohser]

morlamweb, please look up "MyWikiBiz" in Wikipedia. I'm that guy. Then, please tell me all about my "ignorance" regarding Wikipedia. I probably know more about Wikipedia than 99.9998% of the human beings in the United States. (Yes, that means I am saying I am about one of the most knowledgeable 500 or 600 Americans about Wikipedia, and if you'd like to devise some sort of "challenge" to test my "ignorance" about Wikipedia, I welcome you to make a public competition of some sort.)

[gjbloom]

They're spending almost a million dollars on an unverified assumption. They assume that there are many people who would contribute knowledge if only the barrier of markup were lowered. But have they spent even a fraction of that money to verify that this assumption is true? Or to test whether the opposite is true - that the barrier of markup acts as a small fence to keep the impulsive defacer or torrential crackpot at bay?

[Aaron_Fulkerson]

It would be wise for the Wikimedia Foundation to consult MindTouch. We forked Mediawiki back in 2005, added a WYSIWYG editor and many many other usability features, scalability and extensibility improvements. http://mindtouch.com/Technology

MindTouch has millions of users and powers thousands upon thousands of public sites like:

* http://developer.mozilla.org (Mozilla)
* http://ipp.developer.intuit.com (Intuit)
* http://baseswiki.org (Harvard-Kennedy Business & The United Nations & The World Bank)
* http://soapedia.mysoapware.com (Doc.com)

To name a few...

[douglasawh]

I certainly second MindTouch's usability being easier than MediaWiki.

[brettgb]

Mindtouch was the first company that came to mind when I read about this grant. This company knows what it takes to make Mediawiki user friendly. Like Aaron said, they've done it before.

The company I work for, a Global 500 firm, tried using MediaWiki's code first - but it never went anywhere because MediaWiki was too difficult to use and our business professionals didn't like to collaborate with it. Then we found Mindtouch Deki Wiki, and its been our wiki nearly a year. The interface is very user friendly but the technology is powerful. We're now capturing tacit knowledge in areas we never expected, and distributing it to all corners of our company. Deki made it possible.

If Wikimedia wants to make it easy for everyone to collaborate on Wikipedia, they would be very wise to talk with the team at Mindtouch.

[dwinks]

I am one of the "luddites" that could create or contribute to a number of articles, but don't. Notice I didn't claim I can't, as I am sure I could learn how to use the mark-up language, but I just don't want/have time to. Heck, I was reading an article on some species of dinosaur while watching history channel a while back and someone had added something like "Rarrrrr dinosaurs are cool" at the beginning of a paragraph, which was obviously "vandalism". I attempted to edit that section just to remove it, but for whatever reason, the words "Rarrrrr dinosaurs are cool" didn't appear in the edit, even though they certainly appeared in that section on the page. After a couple minutes of clicked EVERY single "edit" button, and none of them having that text, I just gave up.

Usability of the site could definitely be improved, or at least making it much more WYSIWYG.

[JBSimmons]

Having written text editors myself during the IBM mainframe days, it wasn't an easy task to get bold, underline, and itealics. One has to assume that text can come from any platform, any sustem and there has to be a common denominator on the way to display it for editing. They by highlighting blocks to apply changes to (Wiki markups) the final result looked like the way you wanted it to (for the most part).

The hardest thing to do is to find what is in common in all systems. Some are text only w/o bold, underline, and italics for basic input and display output, even in newspaper publishing.They like to keep that to a minimum. You can thank your lucky stars you get to see it WYSIWYG when you're done, plus an edit box below it. I wouldn't complain about it. There are not enough tools to indicate you want to combine effects. Like underline and italics. Can't be done - yet although the system will let you do it. WYSIWYG shows it partially works. Too many quote marks all over confuses the editor. They are closing in on 3 million articles and need to relax some restrictions on bots they have roaming looking for things that really are correct, but marks it invalid anyway. That's what needs improvement.

Another I'd like to see is forced name use instead of IP address capture. Sometimes modem users are switched within a location with just the last part of an IP address variance, depending on which modem you get in the dial-up pool. Sometimes communcating with those who don't have a valid ID is difficult at best. A login should be required for [edit] along with a box for those to type text in DOS format with ALT+#### keystrokes and have a bot that goes and converts those to the exact Wiki Call. The next time the users sees it he will see what Wiki did and how. Now THAT is educational feedback. Having gone through the symbols list myself and trying them did not work well and wound up using ALT+####. That right there is the lowest common denominator and Wiki should ADD it to their system. Not delete it.

If 85% of the world uses PC's and 7% MACS, then the best of editors those should be used. For the most past it was true. The past release made a mess of some articles that need bots written to fix what they broke. So users then can be updated on how to GIT-R-DONE!

[mostar63]

Wikipdia lack of rich text editor (WYSIWYG) is the meger problem.
The current wiki text syntax is hard for beginners.
The point is that WYSIWYG editor to Mediawiki (the software that run Wikipeada) is available as open soure and can easily adapted.
For example look at this web site: http://www.wiki-site.com/ that allow any one to open free wiki base on Wikipedia software with optional WYSIWYG editor.


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