CZ Talk:Usability

This is a temporary discussion area for discussions of CZ usability discussions, which are a rather active but scattered. There are some people who have good ideas, but literally cannot get to the Forum (i.e., prevented by the Great Firewall of China).

Next to the multiple Forum discussions, the next most frequent venue is probably Chris Day's user page, although, for reasons I don't full understand, some discussions are taking place on my user page, but discussions in which I'm personally just listening.

Let me mention some aspects of CZ usability design that may not be obvious, especially when they are different than WP. Some of these are technical, but also represent evolving consensus (including experiments) among Citizens, in various roles, that are trying to improve usability.

Very briefly, the Article/Related Pages subpage is an extremely important part of the conceptual design. I'll simply say that the intended use of Related Pages and its evolved capabilities substitutes for WP Categories. CZ Workgroups may seem superficially like WP Categories, but they are more focused on collaboration than indexing.

Before I go further, note that it is possible to define Article/Definition and Article/Related Pages without defining the main Article.

Related Articles pages are now largely dependent on the "R-template", which also appear on disambiguation pages. This template can be a place-holder, show an article name, a definition-only, or an article name and definition. One of the problems is that certain short topics need the function served by a definition, but it is not possible to wikilink usefully to a Definition out of a main Article. This is a hot area of discussion.

While there is not an intention to create a hard and fast workplan dictated from the top down, my personal opinion is that there is an increasingly strong consensus, among people who have thought about it a lot (and know things they don't know) that CZ is far more concerned than WP about having "unifying places". Those might be as simple as a Related Articles page with no main article existing, but I think it's fair to say that we do not see search engines as the only significant entry point to CZ. Howard C. Berkowitz 13:38, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Howard, this is a good start. I think there are two other usability issues that you have not touched upon. 1) Subgroups, the smaller communities that can exist across or within workgroups. 2) The ability to define tabs for subpages that are not globally defined but might be very important for one specific topic.

I agree that the Related Articles play a critical role in the rise of the citizendium. As i see it they have a role for indexing/browsing. They also have a more organisational role for planning articles. This latter role is the reason I allowed these to exist without the metadata or the article (just reiterating you above).

Another issue for us to realise up front, at least from my perspective as the one that wrote most of the templates, everything is negotiable. The organisation we have now has evolved over time. Many of the issues we discuss now were not even conceived when the subpages were first written. It is possible we need to redesign and that is OK. Chris Day 20:21, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Is there a better space for this page? Incidentally, can one do a page or cluster move across spaces? Howard C. Berkowitz 20:40, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Using Related Articles pages

When planning, it isn't strictly necessary to have more than an article title to put into the R-template. No other content is necessary.

The more one knows about the Template: R, the more that one can do on a Related Articles page, but one can use these pages as planning and organizing tools even with minimal R-template usage.

Subgroups

Again, some discussion on how to use them will be important.

Article-specific subpages

This is an area that needs some usage guidance. There were some cases where Larry told me not to use them; I honestly don't remember the specifics, but I had the impression, at the time, that he did not want a proliferation of nonstandard subpage types.

In other cases, I started out with something in a subpage, and found increasing needs to link directly to it. For example, I had discussed fission and fusion as types of nuclear weapons, but found we really didn't have the weapons effect defined elsewhere. Linking to them didn't seem to work, although I may have had the wrong syntax. I could also see some software being confused on finding article-specific subpages from an external point. Howard C. Berkowitz 20:40, 1 November 2008 (UTC)