Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability/Future projects

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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 Wikipedia: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.

Portal redesign