Monday, November 09, 2009

The power of leading by example


At translatewiki.net, we adopted LiquidThreads. This is an extension that brings structure to the conversations that happen on talk pages. When Siebrand moved over, he did that for everything, for all types of talk pages.

Our community is faced with new functionality that is there for us to use. Typically the language we localise is the default language in the preferences. LiquidThreads is difficult enough to understand when the software is localised, when it is not, it is hard.

The solution for us is obvious. The solution can be found in what translatewiki.net is there for; you localise the software and it becomes more obvious what is expected; we eat your own dog food.

A video would help for the community we localise for.
Thanks,
GerardM

1 comment:

Purodha Blissenbach said...

Eating ones own dog foot can make one vomit at times. This modification is one of the worst experiences for me as a MediaWiki user ever since I know MediaWiki. In my perception, it is a brilliant example of a nearly unusable user interface. There is is some uggly forum software on the market - one of the reasons why I am rarely active in forums - this is relatively close to its "leading edge".