Wikiversity talk:Usability

Guides for page creation?
''note: this thread was started at Wikiversity:Colloquium and copied here to encourage discussion of these ideas. --mikeu talk 15:22, 7 July 2009 (UTC)''

I know there are some guides and tutorials here and there for content creation at Wikiversity, but I'm wondering if anyone with page design experience has looked over some of the learning pages? I'm working through some tech content, and some pages are long-ish while others are quite brief. The overall topic/learning units have enough there that they could be reorganized a bit, but the question is how much content is too much/not enough for a certain page? Anyone have pointers or comments? Historybuff 08:04, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
 * That really depends on the topic and what the goal of the learning project is. We do have MediaWiki:Longpagewarning which displays a warning when editing a page that is longer than about 32KB.  IMHO, it is a good idea to keep a page below a certain size, although perhaps a bit larger than 32KB.  One reason is that I have much experience working in inner city schools where students only have access to outdated computers (if they have access to any computers at all...) that might have trouble editing or even loading larger pages properly.  At the very least it will be extremely slow.  Also, it is becoming more common for people to browse or even edit wiki pages on mobile devices which often have limits to the page size that they can handle.  For example, Family law Ontario (at about 120KB) crashes the Opera Mini web browser on my cell phone with an "out of memory" error.  (Although, see http://en.mobile.wikipedia.org/ for an alternative method for read-only browsing of wiki content)  There is not really that much of an advantage to cramming everything into one large page, and it runs the risk of excluding audiences that we would like to reach out to.  From the perspective of human-computer interaction there are usability and accessibility considerations.  Most importantly, we need to keep the audience in mind.  Are they really going to be able to take in that much information in one sitting or reading?  Would it make the lesson more easy to digest if it were broken into smaller sections on seperate pages?  I don't think we should have hard rules on this sort of thing, but I merely bring it up as something to think about when organizing content.  It is really up to the editors who participate in creating content to decide, but it is sometimes a good idea to ask for others to review the pages to get a second opinion.  Could you provide links to the pages that you would like advice about?  --mikeu talk 16:11, 14 February 2009 (UTC)


 * You bring up some excellent points. I was looking at the IT portal, and a few of the projects are broken into logical sub-projects, but some of the sub projects are small, and seem to be formed from a specific template. I'm really looking to start a discussion on how learning projects should be put together really, as when I started here at WV I really hadn't a clue (but now I have some solid ideas). You have touched on what I wanted to focus on, though -- audience, HCI, usability and accessibility. And rather then just having wikilinks to WP, I'd like to use this as a learning project (if enough participants are willing) to figure out some best practices. I think it would help to bring focus to some learning projects here at Wikiversity, and it would help highlight us to other sites as well. Historybuff 07:33, 17 February 2009 (UTC)


 * There are a number of older pages that were created using template:Learning project boilerplate or similar Category:Page creation templates. Though I don't think these have been used as much recently.  I would be interested in exploring these ideas.  Let me know if you'd like to create a learning project on these topics.  --mikeu talk 15:32, 18 February 2009 (UTC)


 * You mean better looking courses using HTML editing HistoryBuff?--Juan de Vojníkov 10:30, 5 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Not simply better looking courses HTML wise, although that might form a small part of it.


 * I'm thinking more along the lines of better planned courses, and better delivered learning projects. Not every learning project needs to be fully planned, but the more complex the topic and treatment, the harder it will be to have a cohesive course without some kind of planning.


 * I'd love to create a learning project on these topics. Historybuff 06:37, 8 March 2009 (UTC)