User:Stephanwehner/sandbox

= wikipedia Usability Problems =

This is an example page to demonstrate usability problems of the wikipedia.org website with respect to markup.

The concern is with the markup language, and how it is processed (or not processed) when a page is newly created or an existing page is changed.

wikipedia has chosen to use a markup language. This means that users enter their text, and have various options of marking up parts of their text.

When a reader visits the page, they are presented with the original text, with markup applied according to the wikipedia markup rules.

Example
In the most basic application, the user can mark sections as bold or italics.

Bold text is to be wrapped in three single quotes.

Italics text is to be wrapped in two single quotes.

Failure of Error Reporting
What happens if the user accidentally misses one quote, or accidentally adds an extra quote? So we simulate the user entering text with bad markup. For the input itself, please inspect http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_markup_problems&action=edit Following are two lines with problematic quote-usage.


 * 1) 'How does wikipedia.org deal with formatting errors? What is the user shown? This line has three quote at the beginning, and two quotes at the end. The user wanted it to be shown in bold, but in fact it is shown in italics, with one extra quote at the beginning of the line.
 * 2) '''How does wikipedia.org deal with formatting errors? What is the user shown? This line has three quote at the beginning, and one quote at the end. Things are getting hairy, now we get bold, and an extra quote at the end of the line.'

As it turns out, wikipedia does not issue any error or warning about mis-matched quotes.

In particular, the user may feel satisfied about their newly created entry, or their changes to an existing entry, but in fact, when they save their new page or page changes


 * they are not told about the problem
 * they may not notice that they missed a quote
 * what they intended to be shown is not in fact shown.

The Problem of Reporting the Error
Now even if the computer program processing the user's input was smart enough to detect the problem, how would it be displayed?


 * How can the user be asked which number of quotes they meant?
 * The computer program cannot really tell if there is an extra quote at the beginning of the line, or a missing quote at the end of the line.

Counting is what computers are supposed to be good at, much better than humans. Yet here the computer needs to go back to the human to ask about counting the number of quotes.

To let the user count quotes is just about the lowest you can get in terms of usability.

= Link to the wikipedia Markup Cheat Sheet =

For the reader's convenience, here is the Cheatsheet which lays out the markup rules.