The Wikimedia Foundation has been rolling out updates for Wikipedia that will be seen in the weeks to come. The new features come as a result of feedback from hundreds of thousands of beta testers over the past year.
It’s been one year since we began the usability initiative, and we’ve rolled out the new interface to Wikinews (English and Serbian), Wikimedia Commons, and now English Wikipedia, said Naoko Komura of the Wikimedia User Experience team. That means that hundreds of millions of people around the world will now experience an easier to use, and more importantly, easier to edit Wikipedia. Our most recent interface launch, on Wikimedia Commons, was a great success with continued adoption by over 91 percent of Commons contributors. Over the next few weeks, the new interface will cascade to all language Wikipedias.”
The new interface is called Vector and will replace MonoBook as the default. MonoBook will still be available for users who prefer the old layout. Changes include improved navigation, editing tools and search engine.
We kicked off this effort in April 2009, and immediately went to work to figure out how to make Wikipedia easier to use for everyone, wrote Komura. We started with usability testing among everyday readers with no editing experience, and we learned about the way people interact with Wikipedia and how we could make the experience better. Using this valuable information, we incrementally released new features to users who opted into our beta testing group. Over the next several months, we continued to improve the features based on feedback from both our beta testers and from usability studies we conducted. We’re thankful for the input of thousands of international users and volunteers who gave us feedback on our progress.
Source: Wikimedia blog
