Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Future projects

Rough ideas that the Wikipedia Usability Project could tackle next.

Village Pump
The Village Pump is an ugly, incomprehensible mess of tables and too much information.
 * Proposals
 * Split it out to contain more info on if this forum is the place for you...
 * Add helpful Images to assist in navigation.
 * Put the "I want to..." section beneath the actual forum navigation.

History pages
History pages don't exactly have the clearest interface in the world.

Problems

 * "cur" and "last" are not self-evident, and users have complained about them.
 * Not obvious date links to the revision.
 * Design falls apart when edit summaries wrap.
 * Compare selected versions could probably have a better design.
 * Paging is very poor.

Ideas

 * Use a table format.

Recent changes and watchlists

 * Recent changes and watchlists
 * Both have similar issues to history pages, but are even more crowded in places.
 * Design similar to MoinMoin's RecentChanges?

Upload form

 * Special:Upload
 * Eep! Information overload (but has recently got better).
 * A wizard-like UI for users to establish the correct license?

Preferences

 * Special:Preferences
 * Already had a bit of a redesign, but preferences need better sorting.

Edit forms

 * MediaWiki:Edittools
 * Too many buttons, options and text below edit box.
 * Just scattered together, not designed.
 * Too easy to choose the wrong button.

Specialpages

 * Special:Specialpages, a page linked everywhere has now become almost completely unusable. Usability guidelines recommend to order long lists in topics. Specialpages themselves sometimes explain what they do, but not all (see Special:MIMEsearch f.e.).
 * Proposal: New design of Special:Specialpages, add explanations to all specialpages (software change necessary), add a link to related manual page if necessary, rethink content of the toolbox (necessary software change: make it configurable like MediaWiki:Sidebar)

Help pages

 * Update and clarify all the Meta help pages, to fix the overlap/repetition with en: pages here (e.g. Help:Editing tips and tricks and How to edit a page and Help:Wikitext examples all cover the same thing), and to help the foreign language editions that use meta as a basis for their own translation.