User:Yitzilitt/Yitzilitt/Editor Friction on Wikipedia

For every extra step required, a large percentage of all users will give up. The concept of UX friction (or "user experience friction") posits that following even simple instructions can be hard if there are a lot of them. The general idea here should be very intuitive--if people needed to read an article, apply for permission, and then publish a brief statement on a website in order to eat a single cookie, they likely would choose to have cookies less often, no matter how delicious those cookies may be. People have limited time in their life, and even more importantly, they have limited energy. [insert studies about this here] If, like me, you have ADHD, this phenomena is even more pronounced. I've been known to skip entire meals because my food was stored in a box I had to open first (and don't get me started on cooking complex recipes). The more steps something takes, the less likely I (and many others) are to do it.

The concept of UX friction can be used--or exploited--in both good and bad ways. At its best, friction can help organically funnel users to where they need to be, and steer them away from places they should avoid until they are more experienced. Positive examples of this can be found in many open world video games, where the world is usually designed such that late-game content is extremely hard for beginners to access easily, even if it's always technically possible to reach. An altogether different example can be found in academia, where largely in order to screen out crackpots, we've invented a complex peer-review and journal publishing system which, while frustrating for academics, does make it easier to find legitimate sources among the crackpottery At its worst, however, UX friction can be extremely harmful, or even used in actively malicious ways. The writings of Franz Kafka are replete with such examples--bureaucracies which imprison not with chains, but papers. Medical insurance companies have been accused of endangering lives by making the required paperwork for doctors so complex that it keeps them from seeing as many patients as they otherwise would have. The writer Scott Alexander has noted that [insert stuff about Chinese firewall here].

Wikipedia has a problem here. Editing on this site is an extremely frictional activity, especially for new users. This is to some degree a good thing, because it helps keep out a large number of trolls and miscreants, but I believe we may have unintentionally gone too far.

We have strong empirical evidence that