Proteins
Hello fellow Wikimedians!
I'm a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University (MSU). My laboratory uses computational and experimental methods to study protein structure, and to investigate the molecular forces and events involved in folding and self-assembly.
I'm interested in making Wikimedia projects easier for newcomers to edit, and easier for established editors as well.
Tutorials
Once we establish a more hospitable interface for newcomers, we should create a set of screencasts and podcasts to introduce them. I created several for the recent workshop with the American Society for Cell Biology, but those will have to be revamped.
People here might be interested in the topics that took longest to convey to the scientists at the workshop. It seemed as though images, tables and inline citations were the hardest topics. On the simplest level, you might make it easier for naive editors to find relevant images with which to illustrate an article, perhaps by exploiting parallel categories between the Commons and the article being edited.
Drag'n'drop and HotCat analogs
You might consider developing tools for dragging and dropping elements in a WYSIWYG fashion. At the simplest level, editors might highlight a phrase and move it to another location, similar to common editing software. Images, tables and other such elements could be rearranged in this way as well. You could restrict such elements to fall between paragraphs.
- HotCat.js
HotCat.js is an example of a script that makes it easy for newcomers to add categories. We might consider adopting a similar approach for adding images, tables, new sections, inline references and other "difficult" elements. A few months ago, I drafted "toy models" of such scripts on my user account on the English Wikipedia.
The above restriction on re-arrangement of elements can also pertain to their addition. For example, the user interface can ensure that images and table are always created between paragraphs. Similarly, inline citations can always be added at the end of sentences, although they may be re-arranged afterwards.
The usability initiative is a good opportunity to introduce convenient editing tools. But those tools can also be cleverly designed to get editors in good habits of editing.
- Images
I'd advocate a mechanism for duplicating an image from an article and expanding it. The image size is usually dictated by the MediaWiki rendering software, but this may make elements (especially letters and words) too small to be legible. Allowing images to be cloned and expanded allows us to reconcile the needs for consistent rendering and legibility for readers. The present link to the original image serves a similar purpose, but is less than ideal.
- Tables
Tables are particularly difficult for new editors to master. We might consider a tool by which editors can create an empty m-by-n table. After that, the tool could help them to WYSIWYG-edit individual cells within a created table by clicking on them and adding text.
As an aside, it would be nice to have sort-able tables in which the column layout was more flexible. It often occurs that a table has many narrow columns and one wide one for extended commentary (see, for example, TV episode tables on the English Wikipedia, or the w:List of scientific publications by Albert Einstein). It would be nice to arrange those narrow elements on one row with the extended commentary beneath, but have them all sort-able.
Surfeit of help pages?
On the one hand, we don't have enough materials to train new editors; on the other, we have an embarrassment of riches: too many redundant help, tutorial, and policy pages. It would be better if there was "one-stop-shopping" for newcomer help. I'd recommend developing an intelligent front-end, where newcomers can pose their questions in natural language and then be directed to the relevant policy pages. I began writing such a help script for the English Wikipedia to illustrate the concept, but it's very primitive.
Acronymia
A minor (?) problem for newcomers is getting acclimatized to the jungle of initialisms that pepper converations on Wikipedia, such as NOR, NPOV and thousands of others. I wrote a script to translate these acronyms into plain(er) English. Although it translates hundreds of acronyms, there's more in common use. The script also identifies acronyms for which it doesn't yet have a translation.
Accessibility
I've developed a few scripts on the English Wikipedia for accessibility, usually in consultation with User:Graham87, a blind user. Although I strongly favor improving accessibility, my sense is that the Stanton grant is intended for improvements that make editing easier for newcomers in general -- is that correct?
Good slogans
There seems to be a contest for cool slogans at Slogans. ;) Some of them focus on usability issues, which I think might be a red herring; easy-to-use software should be as invisible as the oxygen we breathe. I'd focus instead on the Foundation's mission and some of the things that might attract people to contribute:
- A marketplace of ideas
- A Platonic symposium
- A friendly conversation with fellow enthusiasts