A common theme in Wikimania 2009 was concern that participation in Wikipedia is plateaued, or perhaps even decreasing. Andrew Lih gave a great talk that Wikipedia’s early phenomenal growth was probably a ‘catching up’ phase, and now growth will continue at a slower, but steady rate.
Phew!
But even so, it’s recognised that with only a small percentage of people contributing changes, that there could be improvements made to encourage people to edit. Many people are not even aware that Wikipedia *can* be edited. I don’t think that these problems with participation are only interface problems, I think it lies deeper in the culture of how newbie editors are integrated into the Wikipedia community, and the policy and procedure that people encounter when they start to become involved with Wikipedia.
In anycase, I couldn’t help but quickly mock up some wireframes that demonstrate some alternative ideas to the Wikimania article page.
Here is a quick screenshot of a current Wikipedia article page, followed by my wireframe, you can also download a more detailed PDF of the wireframes.
Wikipedia article page design, now & proposed changes…
The banner
One of the first things that Philippe asked me was: are you familiar with our [Wikimedia's] sites? And I replied — sure I use Wikipedia everyday. What completely slipped my mind was that there is actually a family of Wikimedia project websites, with Wikipedia being just one (albeit a very important one).
With this in mind I’ve added a Wikimedia family navigation at the banner of the page that joins the family of sites together and helps promote the range of Wikimedia projects. At this same level is a search field which ideally would be a entry point into a federated search of all Wikimedia project content with filters to help people narrow down results to exactly what they are looking for. (I would loooove to get my teeth into designing those pages!)
Quite a lot of navigation is condensed, opting for mega-menus to show pathways to different special pages on Wikipedia under headings Find Content, Contribute, and Tools.
Those famous tabs
The most contentious change is a move away from the all-familiar, even emblematic read/edit tabs that appear along the top of each page. Instead these have been moved to action boxes on the left side of the page where they are presented with additional context (because what does discuss really mean?) and where a local navigation for sections within the article would also be displayed.
Quick edits
Instead of navigating away to a brand new page (which for many people I image can be quite a shock) a lightbox allows for a quick edit of a section of content. Hopefully this lowers the barrier to editing by making it seem like they are essentially still on a familiar page – and eases people into the process of learning the wiki markup.
