Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Archive/Misleading inconsistency of interface design with the data model

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Misleading inconsistency of interface design with the data model

NoN Out of scope for Community Tech

  • Problem: The way item pages are structured and function on Wikidata give misleading ideas about the structure of the data, which in turn impedes the efficiency of (inexperienced) editors in interaction with the site:
    On a Wikidata item page, there is a second "+add statement" link if some statements are shown in a separate "Identifiers" section.
    This suggests that the statements go to separate bins when really both "+add statement" links are equivalent. (For some time, I went to special lengths to reach for that other link, which surprisingly didn't have a hotkey...) If you add a statement, at first it gets shown appended to either one or the other section.
    The "Identifiers" section is not a subsection of the "Statements" section; both headings are on the same level. This implies that under "Identifiers" there are no statements but something different, which contradicts the "add statement" link label.
  • Who would benefit: esp. new and inexperienced editors, every visitor of a Wikidata item page
  • Proposed solution: The "+add statement" links should be visually separated from individual sections. And there should only be one. (The upper is more confusing.) So:
    • One "add statement" link should be at the top of the page, before any (section) headings, in line with the "Read" and "View history" links, in consistency with Wikipedia's big "Edit" button and the "Add new section" links on the modernized talk pages on some Wikimedia wikis. This would have other advantages too, like not having to scroll around to find the "+add" link at some arbitrary position.
    • Maybe the visual grouping of statements should be done differently. The section heading could be turned into something more like an annotation. At least the second section heading should become a subheading of the first. Maybe background tint and annotations can replace the headings, or other visual effects that don't imply a split as much. ...
    • The "edit" link of the box of multilingual labels and descriptions should be clearly grouped together with its box and not stray to the page top as much, implying it to allow editing the whole page and then surprisingly opening edit tools in some box somewhere below. The solitary description line following the page heading actually belongs into that box, too...
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

Hi Reseletti: I agree with you that the interface on Wikidata needs a real redesign. Unfortunately, it's out of the scope of the Community Tech team -- this is a project that needs to be led by the designers working on the Wikidata team. So I'll have to archive this proposal as out of scope -- sorry about that, because it is a good and important idea. :) Thanks for participating in the survey. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 21 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

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