Usability study, Wiki Loves Art, and more

Preliminary results of usability testing conducted in late March, as part of the grant-funded Wikimedia Usability Initiative (see earlier coverage), are now available. Participants expressed enthusiasm about Wikipedia as a useful resource, though they experienced substantial difficulties when trying to edit Wikipedia. Participants were unsure of Wikipedia's rules and proper etiquette. They also experienced difficulties with the markup and formatting, especially when it came to adding references, links, and editing tables, and it was challenging for them to create new articles. Participants experienced information overload when it came to the documentation and found it difficult to navigate the help resources.

Following the Wikipedia Loves Arts photography events organized in New York and elsewhere, this June Dutch museums will open their doors to photographers to create Creative Commons-licensed images of important artwork. Wikimedia Netherlands, working with Creative Commons, is gathering volunteers to visit a number of Dutch museums; so far, participating institutions include the Jewish Historical Museum, the Netherlands Media Art Institute, and the Tropenmuseum.

The Wikimedia Foundation has signed a deal with Orange to distribute mobile and web content in the UK, Poland, Spain and France, according to a Wikimedia Foundation blog post. According to the Foundation Q&A about the deal, the partnership will involve adding Wikimedia elements to the Orange web portals and creating mobile and web widgets.

• Dottydotdot has launched The Wikipedia Forum, an independent message board for discussing Wikipedia. It is intended as a friendlier alternative to The Wikipedia Review, a forum that is frequented by a number of dedicated Wikipedia critics (as well as some active Wikipedians) and has been the subject of past controversy within the Wikipedia community.
• There is an RFC going about whether the page What Wikipedia is Not should include plot summaries or not.

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27 April 2009 (all comments)

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==Usability study==

Given the amount of crap that, frankly, only serves to waste the time of new article patrollers and the admins who have to do their speedies, do we really want to lower the editing bar? It's well-intentioned but misguided. It might not be politic, but if editing makes you feel stupid, maybe there's a reason. 208.54.4.69 (talk) 17:39, 27 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that editing is difficult, but vandalizing is easy... You don't have have to know any wikimarkup to place obscenities all over the page. And don't pretend it's a piece of cake to edit an article interspersed with zillions of ref tags, even for a seasoned wikipedian. --Zvika (talk) 07:34, 30 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Also: every user that gets turned away from Wikipedia, because they can't handle the interface or they don't know the etiquette or their first article gets speedily-deleted, is one less potentially useful and productive editor we could have had. Remember that most people editing Wikipedia - even anon users - are trying to help out, not vandalise. If they can't do that, then we don't benefit from all the value they could have added. We don't want vandals, but we do desperately need more good, skilled contributors, and we won't get that if would-be editors never start editing in the first place. Robofish (talk) 13:08, 1 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]