Again, a big flare up of "we the community" demand this and that. Again what Wikipedia, the Wikimedia Foundation is about is conveniently forgotten. At Wikimania there was a really interesting presentation by Raph Koster author of a "Theory of Fun for Game Design". Well recommended once it is available for viewing..
An abstraction of the current huha is in there and this community is described as the monsters who rule it all (my words, his pictures). These people who impose their world on others have forgotten what the game is about. It is about providing access to the sum of all knowledge. From that perspective their issues with the multimedia viewer are hardly significant compared with the increased ease for people who just access the parts of human knowledge we do give access to.
My pet example of "the community" not caring about providing access to our available knowledge is in the decision that easy and obvious access to fonts adds clutter to the user interface and is therefore not acceptable... About seven percent of a population is dyslexic and it is extremely hard to find and enable the OpenDyslexic font. It took a MediaWiki developer over two minutes and he enabled it in a way I did not know existed... He knew it existed, he knew the name of the font. This demonstrates how relevant seven percent of our reader population to our community is.
Should we primarily care about access or is it a playground for monsters?
Thanks,
GerardM
No comments:
Post a Comment