Saturday, March 06, 2010

#MediaWiki #usability becomes mainstream

Some of the best news of the last week was the news of the continuation of the efforts to make MediaWiki more usable. It is now called "UX" or User eXperience.. and a significant part will be based on "community health recommendations".

When the original Usability Initiative comes to an end, the restriction imposed by the original grant will fall away. It will no longer be restricted to improving the usability of the English language Wikipedia; it can now work on improving MediaWiki in general.

In the comments on his announcement, Erik answers ¨Mobile development is one of our strategic priorities, so expect more interesting things coming down the pipeline. :-) " This is welcome news because it becomes aparant that there are a lot of issues to be resolved. Even high end smart phones are not able to render our languages properly and, we want great functionality for less sophisticated systems as well. It may help that several actors in the mobile market are supporters of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Thanks,
     GerardM

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