Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Usability - Infoboxes at Wikia

A friend of mine had me look again at how MediaWiki editing is done at Wikia.

While editing, it shows a little grey text "Infobox Film". When you press it you get a pop up screen relevant to info boxes. Info boxes are typically at the very start of an article. They are intimidating and they hide what people want to do.

The Wikia approach hides the clutter and when you select the infobox, the data and the code are nicely separated. The relevant content is nicely separated from the code.

If you do not like this more WYSWYG way of editing, you can even select to use the old "Code" screen. This can be selected from the taskbar.

There is still enough work left for the Stanton project...The article includes several references; I think you will agree that they need a similar treatment.

Thanks,
GerardM

3 comments:

Erik Z said...

Cool! That looks like a major step forward, and is probably what many envisioned as (partial) solution to the problem of not scaring editors away. I think the place holder could be a bit more standing out (rather than light grey text) but possibly that is already a user preference, I haven't checked.

MovGP0 said...

maybe you should give the Semantic Forms extension a try.

GerardM said...

There was a post about forms in wikitech-l about Semantic MediaWiki.. It had loads of HTML markup.. it looked REALLY ugly and user fiendly!

I hope you will convince me that I am wrong because I really want to know I am wrong.
Thanks,
GerardM