Minh’s Notes

I often hear from people who didn’t realize that each Wikipedia article maintains a comprehensive list of everyone who’s ever edited it, along with every version of the article. The button to display this list is displayed as the History “tab”, sitting prominently above the page contents. It’s so obvious, yet even experienced computer users miss it and cite its absence as their main beef with the site. A similar situation exists for the ever-important Edit tab, which many experienced users never notice.

But in this case, the problem doesn’t lie between the keyboard and the chair. Rather than fault the user, I find issue with MonoBook, the default skin for sites that run on MediaWiki, notably Wikipedia. MonoBook relegates the important history and edit links to a tiny, non-descript row of tabs at top, whose labels are all lowercase. At the time, it seemed like a neat way to deal with the sea of links that had been crammed into the Standard skin’s left sidebar, but MonoBook ended up being so minimalistic that everything but the current article text and the unnecessarily prominent list of translations got marginalized.

Speaking of minimalism, I tolerate Facebook for two reasons: it provides me with an audience and it has a really clean, efficient interface compared to comparable sites. (And it’s blue. I like blue.) Now the second reason is about to go away, as Facebook looks to reorganize its profile pages. They’re going the way of Wikipedia and adding tabs to separate the profiles into three sections: Wall, About, and Photos. Near as I can tell, these tabs will be utterly easy for newcomers to ignore, and the rest of us will notice them only because we’ve grown accustomed to our friends’s half-hearted attempts at being photogenic and writing witty “About Me”s.

Don’t get me wrong: I love tabs. Tabs make Web browsing bearable these days, and it makes using Internet Explorer 6 nothing less than torturous. But other than the occasional 300-pixel tabbed box, tabs belong in full-fledged desktop applications, like Web browsers, not in websites. It’s far too easy for visitors to ignore tabs in websites, because they’re not really discoverable unless they’re accompanied by ’90s-style rainbow-swirling effects as you hover over them, and by then you’ve been scared away.

Though I usually find his brand of usability unnecessarily strict and bland, usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s guidelines for tabs are worth taking a look at. If the tabs are right above the small content box that is affected by them, they’re quite discoverable. But place them at the top of a webpage, and the visitor’s eyes will immediately drift down to the heart of the page, the content.

Not all of Facebook’s redesign is so problematic: I like the idea of combining the wall with the poorly-named “Mini-Feed”, because you’ll often get wall posts in response to changing your profile picture or status, actions that are currently displayed out of context. But I still don’t know about continuing to call it the “Wall”. It was a Wall when you could devowel every Wall post that your friend had ever received. (The old version was kept around in the “History” section, of course.) It was a neat concession to Facebook’s otherwise orderly site. Now it’s just a corkboard: all your changes have to be fully contained within, basically, a boring little sticky-note.

As for replacing Wikipedia’s tabs, I don’t have a solid answer. I would however suggest adding an “Action box” to – of all places – the bottom of each page. Given a generous amount of space there, the action box would list in large font a few key ways for users to interact with the article: edit the article, discuss it, view its authors and history, and cite it. Any other actions, like renaming the article, can be listed below that in smaller text. As it is right now, a visitor is likely to see the article’s title up top, think that’ the beginning, and read down from there. A list of what to do next makes sense at the end of an article. After all, do you tell your friends to comment on your latest adventure before you even tell them the story?

Yes, I’m making a big deal out of a trifle, but it bugs me when websites are more tedious to use than they have to be.

Entry №1172, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 6:30 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Computing, Wikipedia | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I’ve been asked what I think about Essay’s fall from grace. (If you’re too tired to follow that link, basically a really high-ranking Wikipedian who claimed to be a “tenured professor” was exposed as a fake.)

Well, if it ever comes to me having to verify that I “attend Stanford University in California, where I’m majoring in computer science,” I guess I can point them to the CS Department’s directory. :^)

More to the point, though, from the English Wikipedia community’s standpoint, Essjay’s real credentials shouldn’t matter at all, since the community is supposed to judge you on what you’ve done for the site and what sources you can dig up, not what you’ve done (or not) for academia. So the problem was more that it was inappropriate for Essay to boast credentials at all. Whenever he used his fake credentials as a means of winning arguments or swaying opinions, whether in the community or in his short-lived role as press contact, he hurt the project in the long run.

Obviously, faking credentials is immoral and unethical. However, if he had left his “degrees” at his user page and never brought them out in a factual discussion, it might’ve just been viewed as someone’s fancy, and no one would’ve cared. (Except of course the vandals, whom he says he was trying to hide his real identity from.) Similarly, it’s one thing to don a police officer’s uniform at a costume party, but quite another to lure a child into your car using your unauthorized uniform and badge, even though both are acts of impersonation.

Though I’m not entirely certain about some of this story’s details – neither is anyone else, apparently – Essjay should’ve come clean about his identity or at least removed the claims to professorship when he assumed an official position. (In this case, I regard an official position as one that is either paid or which represents Wikipedia in the outside world.) Given, doing so is only damage control, as it doesn’t negate the problem with having claimed these credentials in the first place, but at least Essay could say that he voluntarily revealed himself before someone forced him to. To some extent, he did, but he still held onto the notion that he could protect his identity from vandals by using a fake identity while holding an official position. You can’t have your cake, eat it, and then look like you’re starving. Hm, bad analogy.

I can tell you that, at least at the Vietnamese Wikipedia, someone trying to win an argument based on their credentials is probably going to be ignored. Maybe that’s because its (unofficial) press contact is an undergrad, and merely saying you’re a coterm is enough to one-up him. :^)

Entry №1100, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 12:04 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Wikipedia | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Up-front values: At least Conservapedia makes no attempt at hiding its colors. (Based on Wikipedia logo under fair use for non-profit commentary.)

A new free, online, collaboratively-written encyclopedia – sound familiar? – claims that Democrats have “a true agenda of cowering to terrorism [and] treasonous anti-Americanism”. At least it did last Sunday.

Conservapedia describes itself as an answer to the “increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American” Wikipedia. You’ll notice that its front page features a red, white, and blue color scheme. Guided by six commandments – “I give you ten – six, six commandments!” – the project takes hard-line stances on pressing issues like the use of BC and AD (as opposed to BCE and CE) and American English (as opposed to the Commonwealth varieties). Wikipedia has more of a “status quo” guideline, suggesting the use of whatever is already being used or whatever makes sense for the topic.

The project’s description of Democrats is somewhat less provocative now, framing cowardice and anti-Americanism as claims by “right-wing critics”. Wikipedia would advise against the use of such “weasel words” unless “accompanied by a citation that supports the claim”. Well, at least there are citations. Conservapedia backs up its claim of “cowering to terrorism” with a link to an Associated Press article about opposition to the TSA’s passenger databases:

For four years, the government has used a computerized system to give a risk assessment to nearly everyone entering or leaving the country by land, sea or air. Homeland Security intends to keep the files for 40 years.

Leahy is also outraged that people on the list have no way of knowing they’re on it, can’t see the information, and can’t challenge it. Leahy said there need to be privacy safeguards in place.

Its claim of “treasonous anti-Americanism” cites a CNN transcript about the party’s opposition to tax cuts. Nowhere in either of these articles are cowardice or treason mentioned, much less alleged; these articles are used merely as “examples”. At least they recognize the legitimacy of CNN.

My hope is that Conservapedia will remain nothing more than a novelty. There’s no problem with creating a fork of Wikipedia, but you can’t eliminate bias by promoting the opposite bias. That just gets you two equally biased, equally wrong, and equally disgusted camps. Calling themselves an “encyclopedia you can trust”, the project’s creators believe they’re doing students a favor, by educating them. But if a part of that service consists of convincing a student that China’s One-Child Policy is fundamentally Communist support of abortion, what they’re doing is a travesty.

Thanks to Neil Turner, who got the scoop from The Guardian.

Entry №1099, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 5:20 PM | Edit | Permalink
Categories: Gems, Politics, Wikipedia | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)